AI Generated Research in Plant & Mycelium Behaviour
interactive cybernetic play
Based on the simple exercise of the creation of a graphic score workshop initiated in a sound residency by Artist-in-Residence, Anthea Ipsale. I created a graphic score connected to cymatics: the visual patterns that emerge from sound vibrations. I find it fascinating that each frequency can generate its own distinct geometry, revealing structures that are usually invisible. I am exploring how these patterns evolve in real time which feels like a natural extension of my interest in perception, vibration and the relationship between the physical and the immaterial.
the plant speaks a shifting geometry; the fungus reads it by growing into it. neither the pattern nor the network exists before their meeting — only the vibrating ground, and what consents to it
Understory — the underground companion. Two layers of granular matter: mycelium and plant matter are now living on the same vibrating substrate, and the frequency source is no longer a clean tone but a plant voice.
The plant voice drives everything, and it's built to behave the way plant electrophysiology actually does: a slow multi-rate wander that never repeats and rarely resolves, with action-potential spikes when the plant is disturbed. Because it feeds the plate as continuous (non-integer) mode values, the cymatic figure is almost always mid-transition — a smear of interference rather than a clean pattern. Only when the voice happens to drift close to a whole-number mode does a figure briefly sharpen; the readout lights up "a word forms," the jitter drops, and a green articulation ring flickers on. That flicker of legibility coming and going is the emotional center of the piece — comprehension as something the plant grants, not something you extract.
The mycelial granular matter is two granularities at once. Thousands of fine spores do pure cymatic dusting — settling onto the nodal lines. A few hundred heavier mycelial nodes do something more: when they settle on stable ground, they grow hyphae toward their nearest settled neighbors (real spatial-hash neighbor search, capped at three connections each so the network stays threadlike rather than clotting). You can watch the threads extend — each draws only as far as it has grown, with a faint bioluminescent tip at the advancing front. When the plant voice moves on and the ground destabilizes, the threads retract and the network dies back. The fungus is literally reading the plant's geometry by growing into it, and losing it when the plant stops articulating.
Things to try: Provoke (or touch the plate) injects an action potential — the plant spikes, the geometry lurches, the network scatters and has to recolonize. Mycelial reach sets how far hyphae will stretch to find a neighbor (short = sparse isolates, long = a connected web). Voice restlessness sets how fast the plant wanders — turn it down and the plant holds figures long enough for the mycelium to fully colonize them; turn it up and the network can never quite establish. Sound on gives you a granular cloud whose grain density is tied to actual hyphal growth, over a soft bed tone at the plant's fundamental — so the fungus's colonizing is what you hear grain by grain.
The trace strip under the plate is the score, and the label is doing conceptual work: written once. It's a live oscilloscope of the plant voice, and since the voice never repeats, the score is genuinely unrepeatable — which is the honest condition of a score made from something alive.
Created at Volovan Sound Residency in Portugal, July 2026
©julianaespanakeller