Living with cacophony

Abstract

The potential and development of mycelium based materials has been increasing over the last years. This material is proving to be a green alternative for a variety of commodity materials like plastics, wood, leather, etc because of its ability to upcycle waste streams. A lot of existing research performed is focussed on the environmental factors required for mycelium cultivation and don’t look beyond these minimal environmental conditions. This graduation project contributes to the development of mycelium based materials by looking beyond the realm of these growing requirements. In this research the effect and potential of acoustic environments on the growth of mycelium is explored according to the Material Driven Design Method by Karana et al. (2015). The goal of this project is to provide first insight into the relation between the acoustic environments and mycelial growth. First by looking into physiology of mycelium and the required growing conditions needed for effective growth of the material. Additionally the physics of sound is explored to get an understanding of the factors that define an acoustic environment. A setup was created to host the required environmental conditions needed by designing three modular incubators. These incubators provide a multifunctional growing chamber where different stimuli systems can be placed precisely within while maintaining the required growing conditions for the mycelium and dampen external sounds. Three different conditions were created for this research, a silence chamber, a mono speaker and a stereo setup to see the response of the mycelium to the different types of stimuli. The response was captured by doing a grayscale analysis to quantitatively analyse the change in growth. In this research the key findings of the research provided first insights into the negative correlation between this acoustic environment and mycelial growth regarding the growth rate and textural qualities at higher volumes. In addition it provided that this type of sonic stimuli has no effect on the textural qualities and spatial distribution of mycelium.