By USA Goldmines 
Alvin Lucier was an American experimental composer whose compositions were arguably as much science experiments as they were music. The piece he is best known for, I Am Sitting in a Room, explored the acoustics of a room and what happens when you amplify the characteristics that are imparted on sound in that space by repeatedly recording and playing back the sound from one tape machine to another. Other works have employed galvanic skin response sensors, electromagnetically activated piano strings and other components that are not conventionally used in music composition.
Undoubtedly the most unconventional thing he’s done (so far) is to perform in an exhibit at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth which opened earlier this month. That in itself would not be so unconventional if it weren’t for the fact that he passed away in 2021. Let us explain.
While he was still alive, Lucier entered into a collaboration with a team of artists and biologists to create an exhibit that would push art, science and our notions of what it means to live beyond one’s death into new ground.
The resulting exhibit, titled Revivication, is a room filled with gong-like cymbals being played via actuators by Lucier’s brain…sort of. It is a brain organoid, a bundle of neurons derived from a sample of his blood which had been induced into pluripotent stem cells. The organoid sits on a mesh of electrodes, providing an interface for triggering the cymbals.
“But the organoid isn’t aware of what’s happening, it’s not performing” we hear you say. While it is true that the bundle of neurons isn’t likely to have intuited hundreds of years of music theory or its subversion by experimental methodology, it is part of a feedback loop that potentially allows it to “perceive” in some way the result of its “actions”.
Microphones mounted at each cymbal feed electrical stimulus back to the organoid, presumably providing it with something to respond to. Whether it does so in any meaningful way is hard to say.
The exhibit asks us to think about where creativity comes from. Is it innate? Is it “in our blood” so to speak? Do we have agency or are we being conducted? Can we live on beyond our own deaths through some creative act? What, if anything, do brain organoids experience?
This makes us think about some of the interesting mind-controlled musical interfaces we’ve seen, the promise of pluripotent stem cell research, and of course those brain computer interfaces. Oh, and there was that time the Hackaday Podcast featured Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room on What’s that Sound.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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