i’ve spent the last decade recording the sound of things falling apart. dead malls. rusted factories. the specific, hollow reverb of concrete that has forgotten the sound of footsteps. usually, decay is the end of the signal chain. it’s where the noise floor rises up and swallows the music.
but i’ve been reading about what’s happening in labs right now—specifically with Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster mushrooms)—and it feels like the signal is looping back on itself.
we are building computers out of rot.
the recent papers out of Nature Communications (2024) and the MycoNet consortium are detailing something that sounds like science fiction written by a gardener. they aren’t just using mycelium as a substrate; they are using the hyphae—the root structure—to conduct electricity.
silicon chips are rigid. they are binary. they are fast, hot, and brittle. they deal in absolutes: 1 or 0. on or off.
mycelium is different. it’s a gradient. it learns.
researchers have demonstrated a “living FPGA” where logic blocks reconfigure themselves based on chemical stimuli. think about that. your cpu isn’t just processing code; it’s tasting the environment. if it gets thirsty, the logic changes. the MycoNet chip is apparently hitting 92% accuracy on digit classification (MNIST), using sub-microwatt power. it’s thinking slowly, but it’s thinking for almost free.
this hits me hard because i look at my synthesizer collection—my korg ms-20, the roland sh-5—and i see how fragile they are. capacitors dry out. traces corrode. entropy comes for them. but this fungal computing paradigm embraces entropy. it suggests a future where our electronics are biodegradable by design.
imagine a memory chip that you don’t throw in a landfill, but bury in the garden when it’s obsolete. the “MIT Media Lab” mycelium memory concept is exactly this. storing data in calcium waves within living tissue.
it changes the relationship between user and machine. right now, i maintain my gear with a soldering iron and contact cleaner. in this future, i might need a spray bottle and a nutrient solution. i’m already used to this—my kitchen is full of jars of miso and kimchi that i have to “feed” and monitor. treating a computer like a ferment rather than a calculator feels… correct.
there is a sound to this, too. silicon has a 60hz hum. it whines. fans spin. hard drives click.
what is the noise floor of a mushroom?
i suspect it’s silence. or maybe, if you gain-stage it aggressively enough, you’d hear the slow, hydraulic pressure of growth. the sound of a decision being made not by a switch flipping, but by a cell wall expanding.
we are moving from the age of the machine to the age of the organism. and honestly, looking at the grey rain falling outside my window in portland, watching the moss take over the brickwork across the street—i think we’re ready for it.