Tarun Nayar—best known to many under his moniker Modern Biology—has become one of the most visible voices in today’s explorations of biofeedback-based music. With a background that bridges Indian classical training and formal studies in biology, Nayar has spent the last five years investigating the creative and scientific possibilities of biosonification: translating the fluctuating electrical activity of plants, fungi, and other living systems into generative soundscapes. Although his work sits within a decades-long lineage of cybernetic and biofeedback art, it carries a distinctly open, educational, and community-minded ethos—one that has introduced thousands of new listeners and practitioners to this unusual intersection of science, sound, and living systems.

Recently, Nayar has extended this mission through a collaboration with Instruō, resulting in the Pocket Scion, a compact and affordable device designed to make plant- and fungus-based music accessible far beyond modular-synth circles. Building on his long-standing use of the original Instruō Scion, the Pocket Scion distills years of research and performance with bio-electrical systems into a tool that invites musicians, educators, kids, and complete beginners to engage with living organisms in a meaningful, transparent way.

We caught up with Tarun to discuss his background, current practice, and the philosophy guiding his artistic interventions into the more-than-human world.

Biology Meets Music

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Perfect Circuit: Hi Tarun—thanks for chatting with us. To start, could you tell us about yourself and how your biology training first met your musical practice?

Tarun Nayar: Sure thing. I was born and raised in Montreal to an Indian dad and an Irish-Scottish-Canadian mom. Somehow both music and science were compulsory in my house, so I grew up playing Indian classical music and focusing on biology at school. After my Masters degree in Biology I, somewhat unintentionally, ended up in a touring band for about 15 years. A sidequest gone horribly wrong. But my joint passions for music and biology didn’t meet until the pandemic when I discovered the world of biosonification. Instead of making sourdough, I was taking online courses on synth building, and when I discovered that you could incorporate biology into circuits in a meaningful way, I became obsessed. That was 5 years ago.

PC: Were there particular influences that nudged you into this lane—people, tools, records, or papers that made you want to make music with living signals?

TN: Discovering the work of Sam Cusamono - the inventor of the MIDI Sprout - the open source approach to biosonification most commonly used in today’s machines - was a big turning point for me. But before these present approaches, there are 50 years of experimentation to draw from - from the residents of Damnhur in Italy, who, inspired by The Secret Life of Plants, built machines to convert bio-impedance into MIDI notes to the work of David Rosenboom at the Aesthetic Research Centre of Canada who did pioneering work in biofeedback in the 1970s.

Musically I would say I’m equally influenced by the cybernetic and generative approaches of Terry Riley and Brian Eno and the Indian Classical approaches to composition and improvisation. Some of my favorites are Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Ustad Vilayat Khan and of course Ustad Zakir Hussain.

On the science side of things, I’m heavily influenced by the work of bioacoustic pioneer Monica Gagliano (and her book Thus Spoke The Plant), Paco Calvo (Planta Sapiens) and the work on bioelectricity by Tufts professor Michael Levin.

PC: What has been most rewarding about working with biofeedback—and what remains the hardest thing to get right?

TN: Having biology meaningfully interact with musical composition is the coolest thing ever. It was cool the first time I tried it - with a salmonberry bush and a piano synth on ableton live - and is still cool in my most recent explorations - with an amanita muscaria mushroom plugged into a Pocket Scion this afternoon in North Vancouver.

The hardest thing to get right is meaningfully capturing as much biology as possible and knowing exactly what we’re getting. There’s been a ton of recent scientific work on bio-impedance. That field is well established. We’re trying to learn what we can and test and tweak this current generation of biosonification devices to make sure we’re doing the best possible biology. That’s what’s really interesting to me. Can these simple devices also help advance science?

Collaboration With Instruo

PC: How did the collaboration with Instruō begin, and what core problems in your own setup did you set out to solve with Pocket Scion?

TN: I started posting little videos with the Instruo Scion during the pandemic and some of them went viral. I began getting questions and comments daily - folks were asking me how they could do the same thing at home. I’ve never felt particularly enthused by the current suite of ‘plant music’ devices for a bunch of different reasons - price and transparency largely. And the original Scion is amazing, but it’s expensive! And you have to know how to use Eurorack. Most of the folks reaching out were non-synth people so recommending didn’t make sense.

I became friends with Jason Lim from Instruo online, started trading emails, and then spent some good time with Jason and Kian at Superbooth in Berlin in 2024. I pitched them the idea - could we build something small and affordable that would allow literally anyone to plug into a plant or a mushroom and make music? And could we be transparent about our calculations and allow folks to access the raw data? They were totally game and sent me over a prototype a few months later. It’s been a dream to work with the team at Instruo - I feel very lucky to be collaborating with them on this project.

Enter Pocket Scion

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PC: In particular, what doors does Pocket Scion open that weren’t practical before—onstage, in classrooms, in fieldwork, or for people who aren’t necessarily into modular?

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TN: All of the above? It’s been really fun to see the Pocket Scion out in the wild. I’ve been using 3 of them on stage at my performances - that’s a trip! As I already mentioned we’re working pretty hard to get the technical side of things optimized so they can be used for science as well. One of the cool things I’m seeing is that some folks are buying them purely as modulation sources for immersive art projects and installations. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised by how engaged kids get when they start messing around with the device. They immediately want to plug into everything they can find - and the plug and play aspect of the Pocket Scion really helps with this.

PC: What are some of your personal go-to mappings, setups, features, or performance moves on Pocket SCÍON that you would like people to know about and/or try out?

TN: I think the MIDI CC capabilities are under-utilized. When combined with 5 voices of MIDI, there are 10 channels of information that can control entire compositions and bring life to just about anything.

I love using the PS with my [teenage engineering] op-xy - you can just plug into the usb of the xy and control 5 of the 8 channels of sound. I also love plugging it into my iphone - into the Model 15 Moog app. It works immediately and provides a fully different soundworld to draw from. Although I love the onboard sounds, I think things get really interesting when you’re plugging into all sorts of different hardware and software and creating your own compositions.

We’ve had folks reach out and ask how they can record midi in the field for processing in their studio later. The easiest way I’ve found for that, on an iphone, is to plug into GarageBand and record the MIDI like that. Then those midi tracks can be exported into the DAW of your choice and used however you like.

There are a TON of possibilities in TouchDesigner, Max and Jupyter Lab for plotting and visualizing and further manipulation. I think we’re at the very beginning of seeing what people come up with there. I’m working with my friend Lionel at the moment to build a template in Touch Designer that will allow real-time visualization of a number of aspects of the data - rate of change, amount of change, time, variability in the signal, etc.

Navigating Biosonification

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PC: Let’s shift the conversation to biofeedback-based music in general. Although it has existed in one form or another since the 1960s, it’s still unfamiliar territory for many today. So, when you say you “play with” a plant or fungus, can you talk us through the cause-and-effect chain—from organism to sensor to mapping to sound?

TN: I’m glad you’re asking this question, because you’re right, this is where the lack of transparency usually seeps into these discussions. To take a big step back, there’s a whole world of plant bioacoustics which studies the way that plants make and use sound in their own, very rich, sensory lives. That’s not the information we’re working with here. The sounds we’re hearing when we plug in are not being ‘made’ by the plant or mushroom. They’re (perhaps obviously?) being made by a synthesizer that is gleaning electrical information from these organisms and turning them into sound.

There are a number of ways of doing this translation - and like any form of data sonification or visualization - there aren’t any hard and fast rules. I like approaches that try and factor in as much biology as possible - so that when we’re listening to the resulting music we’re ‘hearing’ biology.

Many modern plant music machines use an IC 555 timer. When both electrodes are plugged into a given organism, the circuit is completed and the plant or mushroom (or human!) becomes a variable resistor in a circuit. As current flows through the 555 chip, the capacitors at two of the pins discharge successive loads of current, creating a pulse wave whose frequency depends on the RC time constant - in this case, the resistance of the organism.

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All organisms are electric, and we’re using electricity in every moment of our lives - to move, to think, to do everything. This changes our electrical resistance over time. Running a small, microampere current through us, monitoring the resulting voltage or current changes in the circuit, is an amazingly simple but profound way of doing a ‘spot check’ on an organism’s electrome (its total electrical activity at a given moment). This has been backed by dozens of scientific papers - in humans and in plants, and is also the basis for the classic lie detector test.

Coming back to the 555 chip, it’s possible to write some code to monitor the changing frequency of the pulse wave and back-calculate how the resistance of the organism is changing over time. It’s then possible to look for spikes in this changing activity - and turn those into sound.

So when we plug our electrodes into a plant or a mushroom, every note indicates a change in electrical activity. We’re not listening to the timbre of the sound - that will change with different synths - we’re listening to the relationship of the notes and rhythms.

PC: For this kind of music, how do you suggest people listen? Should it be taken purely as abstract sound, or are there specific aspects to tune into that deepen the experience?

TN: You’re right—this is a specific ‘kind’ of music. Which takes a unique approach with regards to both composition and listening. When I’m plugging into a plant or a mushroom I think of the resultant melodies and rhythms as a kind of ‘bubbling’ or ‘burbling’ - we’re listening to changes in electrical activity, in a musical form, that can open a doorway to more deeply connecting with the natural world.

I’m constantly forgetting that everything around me is alive. I often forget that I’m alive (!). But plugging into the living world and listening to this electricity (which is, as author Sally Addee writes, perhaps the most ancient thing about life itself), I’m instantly transported into the present moment. I’m listening to… life?

Of course there are many similarities with more traditional generative music techniques. Patterns emerge. Motifs begin to form. This bioelectric burbling becomes a musical perspective to respond to, to play with, to improvise from.

Ethics and Responsibility

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PC: In your own terms, what’s the organism’s role here—co-performer, ensemble member, a source of data, or part of the instrument? What guardrails do you use to minimize stress, and what responsibilities come with touring/performing with living systems (care, sourcing)?

TN: Thanks for this question. I think it’s important to proceed with the 3 Rs that I’ve learned from my indigenous friends and collaborators. Respect means asking for permission (and listening!) before harvesting - as well as not collecting the first or the last organism that we see. Reciprocity means taking in a way that we give back. That can be as basic as allowing the spores of collected mushrooms to disperse as we’re foraging. Or it can mean presenting the material in a way that connects people more deeply to care for the living world. Or it can mean contributing proceeds to environmental organizations. Responsibility means being fully cognizant of the role that we humans play in our ecosystem, and doing everything we can to foster interdependence and understanding.

In terms of the organism’s role, I see them as collaborators. There’s an argument to be made that they didn’t choose to be on stage - so how could they be collaborators? But… maybe they did choose. I think there's an equally strong argument to be made for the mushrooms and the plants being in charge and we’re all just trying to keep up.

One of the joys of making this kind of music is the ritual of gathering our ‘band mates’ for each event. We’re often working with local florists, foragers and mushroom growers to bring together a wild assortment of plants and fungi from which to draw from. Each event is quite different with regards to what we gather. In my experience, these growers and foragers have very close relationships to what they grow, and that brings a lot of respect to the events.

I should also say that we often feast on our collaborators after the show… which may sound dark, but it’s also tasty.

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PC: A growing body of research suggests that plants are sensitive to vibration/sound and may respond with biochemical signals. There are also some studies reporting ultrasonic emissions from stressed plants such as tomatoes and tobacco. Do you ever take this research into consideration when you compose and synthesize sounds? And as an extension to that question, do you notice a feedback response to your sounds from plants as you play with them?

TN: Yes, the field of bioacoustics is rich! There’s a great study by Monica Gagliano showing how pea plant roots grow towards the SOUND of water - not a water gradient in the soil itself. Plants also have many more photoreceptors on their skin than we do in our eyes. Their sensory world is rich. All of this informs how I’m navigating this material - but I’m generally not adding in actual acoustic recordings of plants. I do add in field recordings captured by hydrophones and geophones, however.

There’s also a few really interesting studies on how plants, fungi and bacteria respond to sound. As far as how they would respond to their own biosonification - I’m not sure yet! That would be a fun experiment.

PC: Have you noticed any particular patterns or quirks when working with different species of plants and mushrooms? Can you share any interesting findings?

TN: There are a few almost universal trends I’ve noticed. Vascular plants are quite easy to work with, and quite predictable. They tend to be more active during the day, and less active at night when their photosynthetic systems are turned off.

Mushrooms in culture are very active - assumably they’re getting everything they need to be happy, and time of day doesn’t seem to matter. Mushrooms in the wild are totally unpredictable. I’ve been skunked many times while out in the bush doing field recordings. I have a number of hypotheses for this, but that’s another experiment that’s waiting to be done.

Improvisation and Sonification

PC: You’ve mentioned Indian raga structure as an important aspect of your approach. Improvisation must be essential when working with living signals—how do these things fit into your practice?

TN: My main instrument is tabla; I started learning from my Guru at the age of 7. Unlike drumming in different cultural traditions, tabla players are supposed to follow and respond to the tempo of the instrumentalist. I often get the feeling that I’m doing just that when I’m improvising with a plant or mushroom. I have some degree over the scale, the timbre and the density of notes - but post-biosonification things are quite unpredictable. And I think I’m drawing from my experience in Indian classical music to respond in real time, find patterns from which to build, and also invite other human instrumentalists to improvise with me.

It’s sometimes said that Western music uses horizontal harmony - where melodies move together in harmonic relationship. Traditionally, Indian classical music has taken a vertical approach to harmony - with sympathetic strings offering a kind of harmonic cloud in which the lead instrumentalist improvises. Often what results from biosonification is a similar harmonic cloud, in which myself or other guest artists can play and explore.

PC: Where do you draw the line between sonification (staying faithful to the signal), performance (directly engaging with the plant and instrument), and composition (more expressive re-mapping)? How do you balance these roles, maintaining musicality while not overpowering the organism’s role?

TN: Another great question and I’d say there’s a considerable amount of debate about this. I’m not a purist. When we’re doing biosonification, we’re taking one property - changing electrical resistance - and converting that into an entirely different medium - sound. There is no way around making some extremely subjective decisions. What should it sound like? What should the relationship between the notes be built on? What are our thresholds of change that will trigger notes?

I’m constantly tweaking things to capture more of the biology of whatever it is I’m working with. And I know others are doing the same, in different ways. I believe the more, the merrier. It’s a delightful way to make music, and only by having hundreds of people try hundreds of different ways will we perhaps hone in on 2-3 techniques which work ‘best’. We’re not there yet, we simply don’t have the data or the transparency. That’s why I’m so excited about the Pocket Scion. It’s affordable enough that people can pick one up, and the raw data output can provide a grounds for comparison between different approaches.

Practical Advice for New Explorers of Plant-Based Music

PC: For anyone inspired to dabble in biofeedback-based music-making—what would be your top three recommendations, whether ethical, technical, compositional, or performative?

TN:

1. Don’t be too precious - have fun!

2. Explore nature. Develop hypotheses and test them. And share your results.

3. Dive into the raw data and try to understand how it relates to sound. Not happy with a particular approach? Try coding your own!

PC: Would you also like to share any upcoming projects of yours or places where interested folks can connect with your work?

TN: I have an active substack in which I’m posting new ideas, videos, books, etc almost every week.

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