just by the mass production.

Things that were inventory on the shelves often could end up in the trash.

- [Michelle] Rachel Rosenkrantz had established herself as a furniture maker and an industrial designer, both in her native France and in Rhode Island.

But about a decade ago, she decided it was time to explore something new.

- I missed working with my hands, that was the bottom line.

And I started to play music again.

So that really like propelled everything.

- [Michelle] Rosenkrantz first came to Rhode Island as an exchange student at RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design.

She had an internship with a company in Providence before heading back to her home near Paris.

- The company where I did my internship called me back and said, hey, we need a designer, we enjoyed working with you, would you like to work with us again?

I said, you know what, eight months in Providence was a bit too short, I will give it another two, three years.

And 18 years later, here I am.

- What do you love about Providence?

- It's small enough, you feel part of it, but it's big enough, there's always something going on.

It's great to be an artist here, if you are a visual artist or a musician, it is a good place to be.

You're not far from Boston, you're next to New York.

I mean, it's a good place for creative people.

There you go.

- And over the years, Rosenkrantz says, her own creative process faced some inner struggles.

- If it wiggles a bit, yeah.

- She felt torn between being a musician and a visual artist, and dreamed of combining her two passions.

Was there a moment when you realized, gosh, I can make a living making guitars?

- Yes and no.

Yes, other people do it, so why not me?

And I've been thinking about it for too long to not do it.

And no, because it was scary, it's like it's a drastic change, it was worth the risk, though.

- Worth the risk because she believes she has an obligation to handcraft guitars sustainably.

I think you have a different respect for nature and the way trees are being harvested, the way trees are being cut down, versus somebody who's just buying a guitar at a store.

They're not thinking about where these materials coming from.

- That's true, that's true.

And most people don't know even the woods that are in their guitar, and most people don't even know the type of structure that's going on inside their guitar.

- Rosenkrantz says, the environmental impact of making guitars has been well known for decades.

Much of the timber used for guitars comes from old rare trees that produce good acoustics, like Ebony, Mahogany and Rosewood.

Excessive harvesting of Brazilian Rosewood in particular, has contributed to its extreme endangerment.

It's one of the reasons why she's selective about where she buys her wood.

- My Rosewood is from India, my maple is from the states.

I have some cedar from Spain, I have some cedar from California.

- Rosenkrantz puts in long hours in her guitar studio in Cranston, which sits right below her apartment.

She has a two year wait list for customers looking to buy one of her handmade guitars.

But when the pandemic hit, she says business came to a halt.

- Musicians are my clients, musicians, were not working.

If they are not working, I'm not working.

So it was a phone call, an email, text message saying like, oh, this guitar, can we put the construction on hold, my tour got canceled, and things like that leading one to another.

Like, okay, so now what?

I'm like, well, now I have all the time in the world to finally build the things I always wanted to build and experiment with that I never had the time to do.

- Because you had no business.

- Because that year the business went from building like eight guitars to zero.

- She used that time to experiment with making instruments from other materials while working part-time at RISD.

Take for instance, the body of her guitars, they're not carved, they're grown.

Rosenkrantz packs her molds with mushroom spores as well as organic waste, like corn husk.

- That whole bag might do the trick.

Actually growing a body in mushroom is cheaper than cutting a tree across the world.

That's just the bottom line.

It doesn't look as good as figured maple, it looks like a granola bar.

But there's kind of a brutalist aesthetic to it.

- The growth of the mushrooms fills any remaining spaces and binds it all together in the shape of the mold.

Then once it's dry, Rosenkrantz is left with a solid board.

Her friend Mark Milloff stopped by her studio to try it out.

- Pretty close, because it's mushroom, I think of really delicious porcini soup or something like that.

But yeah, there's definitely a distinctive sound.

It is absolutely not a wooden guitar, a wooden resonance.

There's something that is, I find very pleasing.

(guitar playing) - She's not the first to see the potential in mycelium, the thread-like branches that grow beneath mushrooms.

- See, this guitar encourages that kind of music.

It doesn't encourage, (playing tune) Oh, maybe it does.

I just love the sound.

- Many industries are taking note.

For instance, these Adidas sneakers were made from it, and Ikea has been using it as an alternative to styrofoam.

- It's not like a hippie solution, it's actually tangible solutions with actual everyday application now.

But I saw that, well, nobody's looking at the acoustics of those.

What if maybe there's some solution there too?

So I gave the bees a soundboard to build from.

- Rosenkrantz not only proved mycelium can be used to make guitars, but she also built one from honeycombs.

- The humming of the bees is within the range of the guitar, is 309 hertz.

That's close to like the A string on a guitar.

So I'm like, okay, so that should diffuse a guitar.

- She knew honeycomb was resonant, she designed a bracing structure and watched as the bees built their comb along it.

But then she found herself with a honey-filled guitar that couldn't resonate.

- So I had to leave it a whole winter, but for them to eat, 'cause it's cruel to like take all their food, they work hard and now they're gonna starve, no, I can't do that.

So, well, they had food for the winter, and they return in early April, I had a perfectly cleaned up guitar that was like empty of honey that could resonate.

(guitar tuning) - Rosenkrantz admits strumming a guitar made from honeycomb isn't practical, but she says it's helped her better understand how biomaterials can diffuse sound.

What drives you to explore these biomaterials to make instruments?

- It's just fun.

It's just like I'm having a blast.

I'm learning so much, as I'm working on one, I start to have like five other ideas.

There's so much curiosity, that the learning curve is exponential - And she clearly likes a challenge.

While she's working more with biomaterials, she still uses wood to make guitars including woods that crafters once overlooked.

- I see a lot of people now are using local woods.

We see the use of Osage orange around Illinois a bit more.

Osage orange behaves almost like Ebony, and people thought it was like trash wood in their yard, and now it's treasure.

So it's just to look at things differently and really having like some figured maple is just for the prestige of it.

If you close your eyes and you listen, actually Popper does a pretty good damn job for like the same density.

(guitar playing) - I mean, I'm curious, you're someone who goes to bed every night and you feel better about the way you're leaving the world than you found it.

- I do.

I mean, I'm still worried, but the state of the affair as far as pollution and the consequences that we can feel already, just temperature wise and.

But I feel better that I am trying not to contribute to that and that I educate myself on that, and I can also educate others though.

So, I feel, yeah, I feel better than 10 years ago.

- Rosenkrantz continues to experiment with new materials.