The man who makes mushrooms sing

Tarun Nayar
| Photo Credit: Mark Vonesch

As the curious audience listened with rapt attention, the moonlit evening was filled with the music of plants and mushrooms, an experience entirely new to many.   

Tarun Nayar, the biologist-turned-musician from Canada, who can make mushrooms and plants sing, was recently at Nisarga Art Hub, in Angamaly, as part of his India tour. 

Tarun has been creating music out of plants, mushrooms and even trees by tapping into their electrical impulses and interpreting them musically. An experiment that evolved during the pandemic years, Tarun developed it into a full time project, Modern Biology in 2021, where he connected plants to synthesisers, allowing humans to listen to the changes in their bio electric activity as music. This, says Tarun, was his way of connecting with the natural world. 

For someone who loved synthesisers and Nature, he had been contemplating ways to bring the two together. He soon began taking his performances into the middle of Nature and started improvising with the natural soundscape. For this, he built his own analog synthesisers, too. 

Tarun Nayar
| Photo Credit:
Muita

“It is akin to connecting a plant/mushroom to a device similar to a lie detector, adapted for the use of plants and fungi, and listening to the flow of their electrical impulse,” he says. Tarun then improvises upon these sounds, quantising them (aligning notes and rhythms to a timing) and what emerges is a unique symphony. The melodies may be unorthodox,  

Four years into his project, Tarun has travelled with his plant music, delighting people wherever he goes. He posted his experiments on social media platforms regularly, which made him realise that the music resonated with the people. In 2021, Tarun released an album of plant music, featuring music made with hemlocks, blackberries, apple trees, Japanese maples and an adler from Fairy Creek, an old growth forest on Vancouver Island. 

He often ventures into the forest, plugging into trees and the undergrowth to listen to their sounds; this he says is a constant inspiration. Tarun has experimented with flowers and fruits, too, such as hibiscus, rambutan, Bird of Paradise and even a pineapple. 

The concerts are not rehearsed, as the music takes place according to the natural vibrations of a place and its flora and funga.

Tarun Nayar
| Photo Credit:
C.Pinget

In 2023, when he first visited India, for the Echoes of Earth festival in Bengaluru, he played music with a giant ficus tree. Tarun tried it again this year, attaching electrical cables to the tree and connecting it to the synths. 

An Indian-origin Canadian, Tarun is a trained biologist. His formal training in Indian classical music since childhood and the tabla he learnt in Mumbai learnt the tabla in Mumbai. He has collaborated with artists, Diljit Dosanjh, for a track in his album Moonchild Era. 

Tarun says he is delighted and constantly inspired by the constellation of musical impulses in the natural world. “This world is so alive and I am just tuning in to listen to their music and approaching it as an artist. I hope experiments such as these will help people reconnect with Nature,” he adds.