Fungal Microbes Are Grooving to White Noise and It’s Helping Them Grow Faster

Do you know how YouTube is filled with those videos of relaxing sounds played at various frequencies with the intent of chilling you out, getting you in the right headspace, or just acting as the perfect dim hum to have in the background so you can feel more productive? Well, a study published in a scientific journal called Biology Letters says that fungus grows better when it’s listening to chill white noise sounds. It seems that humans and fungi have a lot in common.

It turns out that some relaxing soundscapes can help promote microbial growth in fungi and bacteria and support overall plant health. Trichoderma harzianum is a green microscopic fungus that helps tree roots fend off evil pathogens that seek to poison and destroy. Researchers found that Trichoderma harzianum can grow up to seven times faster when it’s listening to white noise compared to the same fungus grown in silence. The fungi exposed to sounds produced more spores, too.

All this adds to a growing field of research regarding how sound vibrations can stimulate microbial growth. For instance, past research has found that some frequencies have been known to hasten the growth of mold on fruit. The mold, fungi, bacteria, or whatever isn’t necessarily “hearing” the music as much as it is feeling the music. It’s a tactile thing. It’s like the way our skin reacts to touch. Fungal microbes can literally feel sounds which help it grow up.

In the experiment, researchers built three soundproof booths. Then they inoculated the Petri dishes with patches of fungus that split them into two groups — one that listened to chill tunes and the other one that would just be bored with nothing to listen to. In 30-minute sessions, the Petri dishes were placed on top of a Bluetooth speaker playing a monotonous sound at a frequency of about 8000 Hz. They then measured each sample’s growth rate over the course of five days. The fungi that were listening to the white noise had a biomass that was 1.7 times greater than the ones that did listen to white noise by the time the experiment was over.

Why this happens is still a little bit unclear. Jake Robinson, the microbial ecologist at the center of this experiment, suspects the sound waves cause cellular vibrations that initiate a cascade of biochemical signals. Whatever the explanation, it seems like the method could be expanded to accelerate microbe growth on larger scales like in damaged ecosystems, rain forests or coral reefs could be slowly invigorated back to life with some dude’s YouTube Chill Out playlist.