The US composer Alvin Lucier, who died in 2021, continues to make music, after a fashion. An Australian foursome – three artists and a neuroscientist – have “revivified” Lucier’s brain, whose neural signals are being translated into sounds.
Lucier, a prominent experimental composer, donated blood to the project a year before his death. “[H]is white blood cells were reprogrammed into stem cells. . . . The team transformed the cells into cerebral organoids – clusters of neurons that mimic the human brain,” Rosamund Brennan reports in The Guardian.
“Lucier’s organoids were grown on to a fine mesh of 64 electrodes . . . allowing neural signals to be captured from multiple layers – much like a developing brain.” Matt Gingold, one of the artists on the project, “then adapted an open-source platform to interpret this activity and generate sound, turning the artificial brain into a live, responsive performer.”
In a demonstration of the project, Brennan heard “a fractured symphony of rattles, hums and warbles [that] bounces off the walls . . . filling the space with a kind of breathless, disembodied soundtrack.”
(via http://artsjournal.com)
I’m old enough to remember “The Outer Limits,” the early ’60s show that may be the creepiest in television history. One especially memorable episode, “The Brain of Colonel Barham,” starred a disembodied brain, growing ever larger and more commanding, seething with murderous intentions.
Lucier’s cerebral organoids are more gainfully employed. So far.
Letter V 