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Forbes
14-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Dead Composer Creates New Music, Through A Lab-Grown Brain
Legendary avant-garde composer Alvin Lucier died in 2021 — but that hasn't stopped him from making new music. Credit an artificial 'brain,' grown from his own cells, that emits sound-triggering electrical signals. This in-vitro structure lives at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. There, through Aug. 3, visitors can wander through 'Revivification,' an immersive installation that merges sound and biotechnology to imagine a compelling way creativity could, potentially, live on long after artists die. If you're picturing a Franken-Lucier rising from an operating table to conduct a symphony, science isn't there yet (at least not publicly). The provocative installation features tiny 3D organoids, sealed and displayed on a raised pedestal, that resemble a developing human brain. Their neural activity sends signals that activate electromechanical mallets to strike 20 curved, wall-mounted brass plates, sending ambient sound rippling through the gallery in real time. Lucier, who taught at Wesleyan University in Connecticut for decades, was himself intrigued with the physics of sound, and before he died at 90, played an active role in imagining various ways his creative spirit could outlive his physical body. 'The goal of 'Revivification' goes beyond simply preserving Alvin Lucier's music or creating a tribute to his work,' Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Gingold, the three Australian artists who collaborated with him on the project, wrote in a joint response to my interview questions. 'Our project aims to fundamentally reimagine artistic immortality by creating a living extension of Lucier's creative essence.' The installation, five years in the making, poses intriguing questions: Can creativity exist outside the body? Does creativity retain our uniqueness after we're gone? Artificial intelligence and holograms are already bringing dead artists back to life, but 'Revivification' veers into the realm of biological intelligence to explore a new path for extending artistic legacy through living matter that functions as a surrogate performer. 'This living entity doesn't merely recreate Lucier's past compositions but continues his artistic journey through its own biological agency,' the artists said. 'It responds to its environment, adapts over time and generates new compositions that couldn't have been predicted by Lucier himself or by us.' Lucier was one of the first artists to use brainwaves to compose and perform music — for his 1965 piece 'Music for Solo Performer' — and he reveled in creating unpredictable soundscapes from everyday objects. Performers of his 1977 'Opera With Objects,' for example, tap two pencils together while touching them to various things — a matchbox, a jar, a plate — to produce a surprisingly shape-shifting acoustic experience. 'Your task is to make vivid for listeners the natural amplification inherent in physical things,' he told performers of the piece. Given Lucier's penchant for the unorthodox, it's no wonder 'Revivification' enthralled him so — he stayed engaged in the details on Zoom calls with the artists until nearly the end of his life. In 2020, when he was 89 and growing increasingly frail, he donated blood to the effort. The artists commissioned Harvard Medical School researchers to reprogram Lucier's white blood cells into stem cells, capable of differentiating into various types of specialized cells. Then, together with University of Western Australia neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts, they grew neuronal structures atop a mesh of electrodes that both stimulate them and capture their signals. Notably, the organoids don't just produce sound, they receive it. Ben-Ary, Thompson and Gingold created a closed-loop system where microphones in the gallery capture ambient audio, including human voices and the harmonics of hammer against brass, and feed them back to the mini brain. The result is, in essence, a dynamic sonic conversation shaped by the interaction between live humans and the lingering essence of a dead one. 'By being in the space, visitors to the installation are influencing both the sound that others hear there, and the types of stimulations sent back into the organoid,' said the trio, who have worked at the intersection of art, biology and technology for years. The experiment launches as AI permeates creative fields — some artists celebrate its potential to steer their work in exciting new directions, while others fearing it will impact their livelihoods and possibly the very nature of creativity. So where do white blobs fit into the debate about art's bounds? They clearly lack consciousness, something many would consider essential to creativity. 'Creativity really has to have a conscious element to it. And I don't think this particular piece of art is conscious,' Indre Viskontas, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of San Francisco who studies creativity, told NPR. 'Those cells have no intention.' Still, it's easy to imagine a day when they might, especially with a new season of dark satirical series Black Mirror here to fill our minds with alarming scenarios of technology's unanticipated consequences. The artists believe it's not too early to begin pondering the tangled questions surrogate lab-grown performers such as theirs pose: What rights do we afford them? What are the ethical, philosophical and artistic implications of creating entities that may have the potential to be creative? 'These are just some of the questions we hope people ask themselves while experiencing 'Revivification,'' the artists said. 'We don't, however, wish to offer any answers to the exciting yet troubling possibilities it poses.'
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alvin Lucier is still making music four years after his death – thanks to an artificial brain
In a darkened room, a fractured symphony of rattles, hums and warbles bounces off the walls – like an orchestra tuning up in some parallel universe. But there's not a musician in sight. If you look closely there is a small fragment of a performer. Albeit one without a pulse. In the centre of the room, visitors hover around a raised plinth, craning to glimpse the brains behind the operation. Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like a tiny pair of jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown 'mini-brain' of the late US musician Alvin Lucier – composing a posthumous score in real time. Lucier was a pioneer of experimental music who died in 2021. But here in the Art Gallery of Western Australia he has been resurrected with cutting-edge neuroscience. 'When you look down into that central plinth, you're crossing a threshold,' says Nathan Thompson, an artist and a creator of the project, titled Revivification. 'You're peering down into the abyss and you're looking at something that's alive – just not in the same way as you.' Revivification is the work of a self-described 'four-headed monster', a tight-knit team of scientists and artists who have spent decades pushing the boundaries of biological art – namely Thompson and his fellow artists Guy Ben-Ary and Matt Gingold, alongside a neuroscientist, Stuart Hodgetts. Lucier was the perfect collaborator. In 1965 the composer became the first artist to use brainwaves to generate live sound in his seminal work Music for Solo Performer. Longtime fans of his work, the Revivification team started brainstorming ideas with him back in 2018. But it wasn't until 2020, then aged 89 and suffering from Parkinson's disease, that the composer agreed to donate his blood to Revivification. First, his white blood cells were reprogrammed into stem cells. Then, led by Hodgetts, the team transformed the cells into cerebral organoids – clusters of neurons that mimic the human brain. During the pandemic, the team met with Lucier over Zoom every fortnight until he died in 2021. As his health declined, he spoke in whispered fragments, often relayed by his assistant, but he remained a guiding force. 'We were like art students learning from the professor,' Thompson says. 'He had this ability to cut through anything superfluous and get to the core of what he envisioned.' Ben-Ary adds: 'But it was very much a collaboration. We came with 25 years experience in the biological arts … For [Lucier], it was very science fiction.' In early conversations, Lucier suggested ideas as fantastical as sending sound waves to the moon. But the musician and the team ultimately homed in on a performance that echoes his lifelong fascination with neural signals, acoustics and space. Both sculptural and sonic, the installation features 20 large parabolic brass plates which curve out from the walls like golden satellite dishes. Hidden behind each plate is a transducer (like a speaker) and a mallet, which respond to neural signals from the mini-brain – filling the space with a kind of breathless, disembodied soundtrack. The Revivification team used custom technology to bring the work to life. Lucier's organoids were grown on to a fine mesh of 64 electrodes, developed with a German bioengineer, allowing neural signals to be captured from multiple layers – much like a developing brain. Gingold then adapted an open-source platform to interpret this activity and generate sound, turning the artificial brain into a live, responsive performer. Importantly, Lucier's organoids don't just produce sound – they also receive it. Microphones in the gallery pick up ambient noise, including human voices and the resonant tones of the plates, and that audio data is converted into electrical signals and fed back into the brain. 'We're very interested to know whether the organoid is going to change or learn over time,' Ben-Ary says. The project raises timely ethical and philosophical questions about biology, artificial intelligence and authorship. But, according to the team, Revivification is art first and science second. 'Where does creativity lie?' Thompson ponders. 'As cultural workers, we are really interested in these big questions. But this work is not giving the answers. Instead we want to invite conversations … Can creativity exist outside of the human body? And is it even ethical to do so?' But the team is hopeful that the extensive neural data they've collected might help future scientific inquiry. 'When we work with these big artistic questions, we can push the limits of what's possible,' Gingold says. 'Because science hasn't answered this. They're not even at the point of asking the question.' Looking ahead, the team hopes Revivification will live on – literally and creatively. Ben-Ary says it's his dream for Lucier's surrogate performer to compose 'new memories, new stories' indefinitely. There are also whispers of more extreme futures: adapting the system for remote, inhospitable environments such as Antarctica, or even launching it into orbit. For now, Lucier's genius lingers in that darkened room in Perth, composing in real time through a brain that lives on without him. 'When I told Lucier's daughter Amanda about the project, she laughed,' Ben-Ary says. 'She thought, this is so my dad. Just before he died he arranged for himself to play for ever. He just can't go. He needs to keep playing.' Revivification is at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until 3 August
