The Amazing Rolo

Secret Sounds of Spores Installation

This blog has seen many many posts about my Secret Sounds of Spores project over the past nine months or so. It’s been an incredible journey and I certainly hope we’ll be able to take it even further in the near future.

In the mean time, here is one more video showing the installation as it happened at Inspace in Edinburgh in January. I thought it worked really well in the gallery space, and we got extremely positive feedback. We’d love to show it at other galleries or shows, so please get in touch if you’ve been looking for a fungi-based sound installation.

Spores at Maker Faire UK

Tomorrow, bright and early, I will be heading off to Newcastle to show the Secret Sounds of Spores at the Maker Faire UK! apologies for the extremely late announcement…

I’m really looking forward to it. I’ll be bringing this somewhat hilarious looking box of arduinos, black walnut solenoid glockenspiels, lasers, wires, and mushrooms on the train with me at 7am. I imagine I may spy some others carrying similarly bizarre boxes down to the Maker Faire too…

This will be my third Faire, after an amazing adventure in San Francisco in 2009 and a wonderful trip to Cardiff for a Micro Maker Faire.

Speaking of Cardiff, I’ll be heading to Wales on Monday for a bunch of fun things, which I’ll be explaining more in the coming days. Fore now, a heads up – if you live in North Wales be sure to check back for more info!

In any case, if you’re in northeast England be sure to drop by Newcastle, it’s bound to be fantastic. Check the website for details – I’ll be in the Centre For Life near the train station, please drop by and say hello if you’re around! I’m afraid I won’t be there on Sunday, apologies in advance!

Spores Spectacular

Here’s a video from the “Secret Sounds of Spores Spectacular!” event that took place at Inspace here in Edinburgh last month. It was a fantastic night, with The Dyad playing some crazy free jazz improvisations in response to the mushroom’s spore-dropping-music.

I’ve included some explanation in the video, but if you’d like more information you can always visit the Secret Sounds of Spores page, which has loads of making-of videos and other information.

Thanks again to everyone who came and made it such a brilliant event, and of course a special thanks to The Dyad and to New Media Scotland for making it happen.

A Spectacular Success

Wow. In my wildest dreams I never imagined that the Secret Sounds of Spores Spectacular would be such a success. I’d like to thank everyone who came down, and apologize to anyone who got turned away. It was a brilliant night, and I was so pleased by all of the feedback and amazing discussions I had throughout the night. Special thanks go to musical guests The Dyad, whose swirling improvisational electrojazz combined with the mushroom-spore-triggered instruments with astounding results.

It will take me a while to go through all of the video and audio for the night, but many thanks to all of those who have sent or posted things already. This includes Mark, whose photo is above and has posted a number of videos to YouTube, and Andy and Chris, who posted these photos to Flickr:

Thanks also to all the people who have come into Inspace over the past few days to see the installation. I’m afraid we have to take it all down today, but fear not! It will be back up in Glasgow in a few weeks at the Arches for the Sound Thought Festival, and then again for Maker Faire Newcastle. Much more documentation to come, but a big thanks once again to everyone who helped make last Friday such an overwhelming success.

Secret Sounds of Spores Spectacular!

This week I’m very excited to present the Secret Sounds of Spores at Inspace in Edinburgh. Please come along and see it for yourselves! I think it’s going to be totally gorgeous, I can’t wait to get it all finished up. Just in case you haven’t been following this project at all, you can learn all about it here. In a nutshell: lasers, mushrooms, and handmade electro-mechanical instruments. Sweet.

Patrick and I are busy installing everything in the gallery space today and tomorrow, and starting on Wednesday the show will be open to the public. The installation will be viewable between 4-8pm on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday this week only, so be sure to come on by!

As if that weren’t enough, we will be holding a very special event to celebrate the Secret Sounds of Spores, on Friday night at 8pm. There will be drinks and merriment, and musical guests The Dyad will join me to play music with a live mushroom or two. I am pretty sure that this will be the world’s very first human-fungi live musical collaboration. At least, the first one with a Fender Rhodes and a laser.

Inspace is part of the University of Edinburgh (and is the headquarters of New Media Scotland, who funding this project) and can be found at 1 Crichton Street, EH8 9AB. Hope to see you there!

Spores at the Botanics

Thanks to everyone who came down to the Botanics last Sunday! Patrick and I had a drop-in session to show off our Secret Sounds of Spores installation, and we both felt that it went really well.
We got lots of great video and photos, which we will be going through in the coming days. In the mean time you can see this video (featuring a glimpse into a fascinating tangential conversation I had with Paul Stamets) that Patrick put together showing everything in action:

Secret Sounds of Spores, opening today!

I’m posting this from the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens, where I’m busy installing my latest installation, The Secret Sounds of Spores. Followers of this blog and my twitter feed will no doubt be aware of this project, as I can’t seem to stop talking about it! In a nutshell, I’m working with mycologist Patrick Hickey to make a musical installation using mushrooms.
I’ve made yet another video about it all, this time going into more detail about how the software works:

The installation is part of a whole show about mushrooms – From Another Kingdom: The Amazing World of Fungi. It is opening tonight at the John Hope Gateway of the Edinburgh Royal Botanic Gardens.

Maybe I will see you there! Don’t worry if you can’t make it, the installation will be up for a few weeks at least, and it’s free. Let me know if you happen to find any mushrooms that you want to stick in the installation, we’re going to need a lot of them in the coming weeks!

Spores at the Apple Store

For the past few weeks Patrick Hickey and I have been working more and more on our Secret Sounds of Spores project, which is coming together nicely. For those of you just joining us, we are building an installation for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh which will create music from falling mushroom spores. You can see these spores if you shine a laser underneath a live (or recently deceased) mushroom, and I’m building custom software that will analyze them and trigger a series of strange musical instruments that Patrick and I are building. My previous post explains the concept a bit more, and here’s a new video that shows some of the instruments in action:

Patrick and I will be giving a demonstration and explanation tomorrow night, the 15th of July, at the Apple Store in Glasgow. The event is free and begins at 6pm. We will be showing off a few of the instruments, I’ll be explaining how I’ve approached the software, and if this rain continues we shouldn’t have any trouble finding some mushrooms!

You can RSVP on the New Media Scotland Facebook Group or Eventbrite page.

Hope to see you there!

edit: as I’ve said in the comments, thanks to all who came by! I’ll post photos as soon as I get them from the Apple Store, in the mean time here is one of the mushrooms set up with the laser:

The Secret Sounds of Spores

I’m working on a project right now with Patrick Hickey, founder of Nipht Technologies, which involves building an installation that will create music from mushrooms.

This all came about when Patrick showed me some videos he had made using closeup footage of a laser pointed underneath a protected mushroom – as you will see in the footage below, it’s absolutely gorgeous. I loved how shining a laser revealed a whole hidden world that to me had an intrinsically artistic and musical quality.

Anyway, we decided to collaborate and make an installation that would turn the patterns of those falling spores into music. We were awarded an Alt-W grant from New Media Scotland for the idea, and we have been working on it for the past few weeks. This video gives a bit of an introduction to what we are doing:

One interesting (and unexpected) outcome of tracking the spores to make music is that you end up with a really fascinating data set. This image represent the notes on a piano roll being triggered by three different mushroom spore video feeds – you can see the different patterns created by the different mushrooms.

It’s a big project, and it will take a few more blog posts to explain it all, so if you have any questions please let me know and I will address them as well as I can!