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Go do a sit spot yourself. Find a mushroom or some rotting wood and sit. Engage your senses and release your mind. Exist in nature for 10-15 minutes. This is best done regularly, but is fun to do whenever.

We did this near a patch of mushrooms.

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I mainly focused on hearing. I closed my eyes to better focus on the sounds of nature. I heard birds. I lay in the leaves and felt calmer than I have in months.

There weren't any sounds associated with the mushrooms, but I was thinking about them. What sounds would they make?

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A group of students working as a collective to prepare oak logs for shiitake growing.

This audio follows us into the woods with chainsaw and wheelbarrows at the ready. Cutting up the branches of a fallen oak near the soccer field, and schlepping them to the kern center.

This Saturday, 4/25, Cassidy and Arlo, as well as Ashton are hosting an inoculation workshop where we drill, plug, and wax our logs. After this weekend they will require no human inputs and will produce bountiful food-medicine for the next 4-5 years in the form of shiitake mushrooms.

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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qzB6IHzm9DA0akJrFDs8P2p_TG_cviVi/view?usp=sharing

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For these interviews, we interviewed five Hampshire students. We sat them down, handed them a couple types of mushrooms--Shiitake and Oyster--and waited to see if/how they would respond.

Many people seemed uncomfortable or didn't know what to say. Some people wanted to put the mushrooms down immediately. Some people seemed to have brainstorms related to mushrooms and went off on semi-related but interesting topics.

Some started making music and sounds with the mushrooms. That may have been prompted by us recording.

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I focused on using all of my senses while existing in this sit spot mext to a rotting log. I observed that every niche, ecological and within me was filled or in the process. Wherever my attention went, there is something to delight it. When I widened my vision I saw the trees in the breeze doing a synchronous dance, focusing on the ground I saw a parade of ants and humble beetle.

I wonder what senses mycelium has. I tried to feel the earth and her vibrations, I figured that was on track.

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1. The process of completing our project is fun for us, making us happy to be learning.
2. Our understanding of mushrooms is deepened by exploring them through sound.
3. We follow our flights of fancy, learning from emergent opportunities.

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Our project has taken on a lot of forms. Originally, we wanted to listen to mushrooms and turn their bodies into music. But we didn't have long enough to grow mushrooms.

The project was chaotic, but creative. Right now it is branching off in a lot of different directions, as is seen in the mind map in this Padlet. We found the sounds of mushrooms, and we also found the sounds that we made while trying to grow mushrooms. We listened to many songs of nature during our project, even if we didn't record all of them.

We went out to the reservoir, to the dock, to brainstorm. Nature gave us some beautiful sounds in the form of a rainstorm that we did not record because we were thinking about the moment.

I think this project, as well as this class, has taught me to listen to the beauty in any sort of thing you hear. Any sound can be beautiful.

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Download the file to listen

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These songs were created by sonifying data that was recorded from each of these organiss. The four creatures explored are Cordyceps militaris (Cordyceps fungi), Lentinula edodes (Shiitake), Homo sapien (Human), and Acer rubrum (Red maple). We compared the DNA in each of these creatures ITS sequences. The ITS squence is present in many life forms across domains but differs slightly, creating slight variations in song. We created song by converting the DNA sequence(4 unique characters) into a protein sequence (20 unique characters). We turned this string of letters representing proteins into song using a program called PROM --- Protein Music Composer, created by University of Singapore.