In Australia, a team of artists together with a neuroscientist created a “mini-brain” capable of generating neural impulses and converting them into music. For this, leukocytes of the famous American composer Alvin Lussier, who died in 2021, were used. About this informs The Guardian.
The idea became the basis of an artistic experiment called “Renaissance”, which they started working on as early as 2020. Its authors were looking for a figure who would embody the spirit of experimental music, and they chose Alvin Lucier, one of the pioneers of the genre in the 20th century. In 1965, he was the first to use brain waves to create live sound.
Communication with the composer continued since 2018, but Lussier agreed to join the experiment only in 2020, already at the age of 89, being in a critical condition due to Parkinson’s disease. During the pandemic, the team spoke with him regularly on Zoom, every two weeks, until his death.
When the composer could no longer speak independently, his ideas were conveyed to an assistant, but Lussier himself remained a key figure in the project. Among his first ideas was to send sound waves to the moon, but later settled on a performance format that reflects his interest in neural signals, acoustics, and spatial sound.
Based on the donated cells, leukocytes at Harvard Medical School were reprogrammed into stem cells from which cerebral organoids—three-dimensional microstructures similar to the human brain in its early stages of development—were grown. They provide neural signals that artists transform into sound.
The minibrain was placed on a special grid of 64 electrodes, created in cooperation with a German bioengineer. This technology allows reading signals from several layers of the organoid. The platform for the analysis of neural activity has been adapted with open source code, which allows the conversion of signals into audio.
The artists also created an interactive sculptural object: a structure of 20 large parabolic brass plates. A transducer and a hammer are hidden behind each of them, which respond to signals from the organoid and fill the space with sound blows.
The authors of the experiment believe that the organoid is able not only to generate sound, but also to perceive it. The gallery has microphones that pick up the environment — the voices of visitors and the sounds of the installation itself. The received audio signals are converted into electrical impulses and returned to the organoid. Now, researchers are looking to see if it can respond to external influences or even learn over time.
