Sustainable guitars made from mushrooms offer one solution to industry’s environmental issues – plus it’s ‘a new sound’
- US-based instrument maker Rachel Rosenkrantz is making sustainable guitars using mushroom spores and other novel materials such as honeycomb
- Traditional guitars are made of wood, which is biodegradable but can lead to issues such as overlogging
Leave mushroom spores in a mould for a couple weeks and they’ll bloom into a puffy material akin to Brie cheese that fills its container, says Rachel Rosenkrantz, a sustainably minded guitar-maker innovating with biomaterials.
Once her mycelium – the root-like structure of fungus that produces mushrooms – mimics the rind of a soft-ripened cheese, Rosenkrantz dehydrates it into a lightweight, biodegradable building material – in this case, the body of a guitar.
The musician, who trained as an industrial designer, embarked on her career as a luthier – a maker of string instruments – about a decade ago, and over the past several years has integrated mycelium and other biomaterials in her quest to create more environmentally friendly, plastic-free instruments.
Rosenkrantz chuckles as she delivers her Brie analogy that’s also a nod to her French roots; the designer was raised in Montfermeil, an eastern suburb of Paris, and now lives near Providence, in the US state of Rhode Island, where she teaches at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design.
The basement atelier below her sunny apartment full of plants and books is home to her craft and doubles as a science lab, where she’s growing materials like kombucha leather to make banjo heads, and using fish leather to make pickguards.
“In the design world, everybody’s working with biomaterial. It’s exponential,” the 42-year-old says.