Alvin Lucier: the dead composer whose artificial brain is still creating music
In December 2021, composer of the avant-garde and Wesleyan University professor Alvin Lucier passed away, leaving behind an acclaimed legacy in experimental sound art and academic exercises in the field of psychoacoustics. However, shortly before his death, Lucier signed up for a revolutionary new musical exhibit that would ensure he could continue creating it long after he passed.
Inaugurated this year in the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the post-mortal Revivification project features a bronze plinth with an “in-vitro” brain nestled in the centre, grown from Lucier’s blood samples. Sitting atop an electrode mesh, the brain’s signals trigger 20 large brass plates with transducers attached to strike with little mallets, crafting an eerie metallic hum played entirely at the mercy of the lab-grown matter’s organic whims.
It’s what Lucier would have wanted. Long fascinated by the biological possibilities of sound, his seminal works saw early explorations with vocoder technology in 1966’s North American Time Capsule and the deployment of pioneering biofeedback and digital delay units in 1978’s Clocker. 1969’s I Am Sitting in a Room is a spoken word art piece featuring Lucier recording and rerecording the same short phrase til his intelligibility is lost in a haunting swamp of resonant frequencies.
Most pertinent to his final work is 1965’s Music for Solo Performer, in collaboration with physicist Edmond Dewan. Sitting in front of a stage with an electrode cap in a relaxed state with his eyes closed, the brain’s alpha waves were directed toward coned percussion instruments with the volume adjusted by assistants.
But it would be the Revivification exhibit that he’d never see that would arguably prove to be his defining project. Having conceived the idea back in 2018, Lucier fully committed himself to the exercise in 2020 at 89, suffering from Parkinson’s, and agreed to offer his white blood cells to neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts and the rest of the bio-arts team, Nathan Thompson, Guy Ben-Ary and Matt Gingold.
Reprogramming the sample into stem cells, the matter was repurposed into clusters of neurons called cerebral organoids, all taking place during the pandemic in the last few months of Lucier’s life. Holding regular Zoom meetings, Lucier was able to keep abreast with the project until the very end.
“We were like art students learning from the professor,” Thompson told The Guardian, “he had this ability to cut through anything superfluous and get to the core of what he envisioned.” Ben-Ary added: “But it was very much a collaboration. We came with 25 years [of] experience in the biological arts … For [Lucier], it was very science fiction.” Curiously, Lucier’s ‘brain’ also receives information based on the audio in the room, the change in ambience possibly altering the messages being fired off to the 20 parabolic plates neurally bonged. It’s quite possible that the organoid may ‘learn’ new ways of emitting rhythms or sequences from the late composer.
While some may feel squeamish at such tampering with the deceased, the stirring and spectral performance at play serves no greater honour for an artist who spent their life marrying creative expression, technical innovation, and scientific inquiry.
