The Dead Composer Whose ‘Brain’ Still Makes Music

In this episode, scientists and artists discuss "Revivification", a Perth museum installation where brain organoids grown from Alvin Lucier's blood generate music in response to sound and audience interaction. The piece challenges assumptions about consciousness, learning, and what it means to extend an artist's legacy through cutting-edge biology. The conversation threads through Lucier's EEG-inspired experiments, the Self project with living neurons, and the ongoing questions about immortality, agency, and the role of art in probing the brain's mysteries.

The hosts trace the lineage from early EEG research to musical performances, highlight the collaborative creation of organoid-based sound, and examine whether these tiny neural networks can learn or exhibit any form of “in vitro intelligence.”

Overview of Revivification in Perth

The Science Quickly discussion centers on revivification, an exhibit in an Australian museum that presents brain organoids derived from Alvin Lucier's own blood. These organoids sit on a brass plinth at the center of a curving gallery, while brass plates around them vibrate in response to neural firing, audience noise, and other inputs. Microphones capture the sounds produced and feed signals back into Lucier’s cells, creating a living feedback loop that humans can hear as music. The piece explicitly aims to “revivify” a late artist through a biological process, prompting audiences to confront questions about consciousness, creativity, and the limits of technology in art. "There was something about the way that he was that made you think that he was never going to die." - Amanda Lucier

As the host notes, the project builds on a century of neuroscience tools, beginning with the electroencephalogram, or EEG, and moving into living networks that can interact with environments. The exhibit invites viewers to reflect on whether a brain organoid can possess a form of agency or learn from its surroundings, and whether such learning constitutes intelligence at all.

From EEG to Audible Music: A Historical Thread

The discussion revisits the EEG’s role in opening real-time windows into brain activity, with alpha waves highlighted as a key signal that is too low in frequency to be heard unaided. The piece Music for Solo Performer from the 1960s was a pivotal step: Lucier would meditate with EEG electrodes, and when his brain produced measurable alpha activity, it would drive speakers and percussion, turning invisible neural rhythms into audible sound. The narrative frames this as a methodical, almost scientific approach to composition, underscoring Lucier’s lifelong interest in how physical conditions shape sound.

"Alpha brainwaves are too low in frequency to be heard by the human ear." - Alison Parshall

The Self Project and the Living Neural Network

Artist Guy Ben-Ari adapted Lucier’s experimental sensibilities by creating Self (CeLL F), a performance that hooked a live neural network grown from Ben-Ari’s own cells to analog synthesizers and microphones. The project allowed real-time improvisation with human musicians, yielding a musical dialogue that felt neither purely human nor purely mechanical. The team eventually invited Lucier to participate, envisaging a collaboration that would extend his artistic influence beyond death, transforming his biology into a continuing art form. "Conceptually it was like an improv session between two jazz musicians." - Guy Ben-Ari

Learning, Intelligence, and the Consciousness Question

A central tension in the piece is whether these organoids can learn or display any form of intelligence. The researchers emphasize that while brain organoids can respond to stimuli and adjust outputs, they are not conscious in any currently understood sense. Scientists discuss in vitro intelligence as a way to describe learning-like behavior in a controlled neural culture, while acknowledging the soft boundaries between learning, memory, and awareness. "I think we're very close to being able to demonstrate that organoids do have some capacity for learning" - Kenneth Kossi

Ethics, Memory, and the Legacy of Alvin Lucier

The conversation turns to what it means to immortalize an artist through biology. The project foregrounds questions about the fragmentation of memory, whether any filament of an artist’s memory could survive biological transformation, and how audiences should interpret such an exhibit. The discussion quotes the collaborators’ reflections on immortality, memory, and the poetics of bringing an artist into a new, living medium. "There is a philosophical question about whether a filament of memory could be retained through this biological process." - Guy Ben-Ari

Reflections and the Future of Art and Neuroscience

As the episode closes, the participants connect revivification to broader debates about art, science, and the evolving capabilities of brain-inspired technologies. The exhibit remains, at its core, a provocative inquiry into how sound emerges from structure, how living tissue can participate in creative processes, and how artists and scientists together push the boundaries of what it means to create music, even when the “musician” is a cluster of developing neurons. The discussion ends with reverence for Lucier’s approach to observing physical laws and crafting experiments that reveal beauty in the most precise, methodical conditions. "There is a lot of sitting in absolute silence, and that is the absolute silence in yourself, not rustling your shirt or uncrossing your legs" - Amanda Lucier