Next time you eat a mushroom risotto, just know those fungi were making music before sliding down your gullet.

It turns out mushrooms have an electromagnetic field that makes music, and you can hear their songs at the third annual Electrowave: The Rocky Mountain Electronic Music Festival. The mostly free event is Friday through Sunday at Ent Center for the Arts, 5225 N. Nevada Ave.; electrowavemusicfestival.org.

“There are little synthesizers that you can hook up to mushrooms, and they respond to the mushrooms’ electromagnetic field, and they make music,” said the festival’s co-founder and artistic director, Jon Forshee.

“(It sounds like) kind of a mystical windchime. Windchimes, but electronic, and they change – the rhythm, the loudness – with whatever is going on with the mushroom.”

A Myco-Music Installation, where festival goers can listen to the musical mushrooms, will be available during the festival. And a Myco-Music Performance will feature musicians collaborating with the sound of the mushrooms. It’s at 3 p.m. Sunday within Nina Elder’s “The Source Never Diminishes” exhibit in the Galleries of Contemporary Art at the Ent Center.

The festival, a collaboration between the Colorado Modular Synth Society and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs Department of Music, was conceived to pay homage to electronic music, electronic musical instruments, and performers, composers and facilitators of electronic and electroacoustic music.

“The idea was to open the conversation and blur the distinction between research, academic music or studies, and the things going on in the community,” said Forshee, a music technology professor in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at UCCS. “We see this as a research and community collaboration – bringing ears and visibility to all the music we have throughout our state.”

Among this year’s offerings are a Friday night dance club party with five DJs from Colorado and surrounding states, two free concerts each day, lectures, workshops and a synthesizer petting zoo, where attendees can play with different synthesizers.

Aligning with the mushroom theme is the Fungi Film Fest: An Audio-Visual Celebration of Mushrooms and Mycelium, featuring 14 short films about mushrooms. Tickets are $5-$15 for the 1 p.m. Sunday screening; entcenterforthearts.org.

A Friday afternoon lecture by UCCS lecturer, composer and sound designer Bonny Baez will focus on developing audio for video games, and on Saturday night, trumpet electronics musician Jeff Kaiser, from the University of Missouri, will perform.

“This one should be pretty far out,” Forshee said. “He’s a guru in the electronic music world. He’s innovative in a lot of ways, combining live trumpet performance with electronics, and making interesting and bizarre things like noise music covers of Bob Dylan.”