This guy has been dead since 2021 but is still creating music

Posthumous releases from artists who have passed on is nothing new. Jimi Hendrix released exponentially more albums as a dead person than he ever did when he was live. But Alvin Lucier’s post-death career is even more interesting.

Back in 1965, Lucier, who is also very interested in neuroscience, became the first person to create music using nothing but his brainwaves. His “Music for Solo Performer” was a groundbreaking creative and neuroscientific experiment.

Before Lucier died in 2021, he agreed to participate in a project called “Revivification.” With the help of a four-man team, Lucier donated a bunch of white blood cells which were somehow reprogrammed into stem cells. The team than transformed those stem cells into something called “cerebral organoids.” These are clusters of neurons that can imitate human brain activity.

Lucier’s white blood cell/stem cells/cerebral organoids were grown into a mesh of 64 electrodes. They allow neural signals from that bio-electronic mesh–essentially a primitive artificial brain–to be captured and plugged into a program that can interpret whatever activity might be going on. That collected data is then used to generate sound. And not only that: the “brain” appears to be alive and responsive.

Whoa.

The whole contraption is set up at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. The organoids hear the sound fed into them by mics placed around the gallery. The mics pic up all the noise (including any human voices), convert them into electrical signals and then feed everything back into the “brain” mesh. It then responds with sounds of its own, including music.

The team is now watching to see if the mesh learns and changes over time. Read more about everything here. And if you really want to go into the weeds, download this paper.