How a Lab-Grown Mind Wrote Music Three Years After Its Composer Died

May 7

Spooky and weird, but currently, in a darkened gallery in Western Australia, a brain sits suspended in a jar of fluid, softly pulsing with electricity.

Wires connect it to curved brass plates, which hum and chime in response to its thoughts. This isn’t just some creepy art piece (although, it also is), this brain (grown from the cells of experimental composer Alvin Lucier) is composing music in real time. And it’s doing so three years after his death.

If you think that’s haunting, surreal, and beautiful all at once, then good, we’re on the same page, because it is.

It’s also a glimpse into something deeper: a question about what creativity is, where it lives, and whether it can even outlast some of us.

Now let me jump into this eerie and extraordinary tale of brains, music, memory, and legacy, and what it might mean for the future of art, consciousness, and humanity itself.

The Composer Who Made Sound Physical

Alvin Lucier wasn’t your typical composer who stands in front of an orchestra.
Born in 1931 and best known for his experimental piece I Am Sitting in a Room, Lucier believed music wasn’t just something you hear. It was something you actually inhabit to experience correctly. He used brainwaves, room resonance, echolocation, and even the beating of his own heart to create soundscapes that were more science than song, and more feeling than form.

He asked questions through his music.
What does a room sound like when it listens to itself, or when sound loops on itself endlessly? Where does your voice go when it disappears into a wall?

When Lucier died in 2021, it felt like we’d lost a singular mind in the world of music and composition. But that mind apparently wasn’t finished speaking like most of us thought.

A Brain Reborn

In 2025, a project titled Revivification opened at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. The centerpiece was a “mini-brain” grown from Lucier’s blood, donated before his death.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School reprogrammed his cells into stem cells, then coaxed them into becoming cerebral organoids…three-dimensional, brain-like structures that echo the early development of a human mind.

This isn’t a completely new idea or project. Lab-grown brains, called “organoids,” are now being used to study disease, drug response, and even primitive neural behavior. But Lucier’s organoid was different in that it wasn’t grown to be studied, it was grown to compose music.

Twenty large brass plates surround the brain, receiving its signals and transforming them into sound via transducers and actuators. The result was a living, evolving composition, improvised by an entity that isn’t alive in the traditional sense.

It’s music, sure in that sounds are created as a result of it. But it’s also something more that really can’t be named, it’s a collaboration between biology, memory, and machine.

Who’s Really Composing?

This put my brain into a strange spiral, is this Lucier’s music? Or just a machine interpreting cellular twitchings?

The team behind the project (artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson, Matt Gingold, and neuroscientist Stuart Hodgetts) doesn’t pretend to know. They don’t claim this is a reincarnation or preservation of Lucier’s genius. Instead, they call it a form of transformation, or some kind of a continuation of the questions Lucier asked in life.

What is sound, or identity, can creativity be detached from consciousness?

They aren’t trying to make the brain “think like Alvin.” They’re letting it express whatever it is now, an echo of the man, refracted through biology and art. To me, that feels like the most Lucier thing of all, it’s a strange echo of his own beliefs that lived on without him, and I mean actually lived.

Not Just for Artists

This story isn’t just for music nerds or philosophers (of which I am neither, although I like listening to music on YouTube). It touches more on everything from biotech to AI, memory to mourning.

It asks strange questions like what does it even mean to be human in an age where parts of us can be cloned, regrown, and reanimated? What about parts of us being mashed into AI or other strange programs we have no comprehension of? And it raises a more chilling thought for those of us too excited about Halloween to explain: if we can do this with creativity, could we one day do it with decision-making? With leadership? With war?

Can we bring back minds to solve problems or to finish projects? What about to rule? Or worse… to sell?

As Lucier’s brain composes, it forces us to listen, not just to music, but to the billion and one questions this digs up post-death.

The Art of Dying Differently

There’s something oddly hopeful here, too. In a world obsessed with permanence (where we fear death, legacy, and loss) Lucier’s brain whispers a new possibility that maybe letting go isn’t the end of all things.

It makes me think that our essence doesn’t need to be frozen in time and exist in only a century of time before vanishing forever into the void of the universe and time. Maybe it can become something new.

This is where the art world and biotech hold hands and where spirituality and science meet on a gallery floor.
Where grief becomes music it also becomes questions that will make some squirm and others hope.

Why This Matters (Even If You’re Not Into Avant-Garde Music)

You don’t need to know who Alvin Lucier is to be moved by this. I didn’t before I saw this crazy story and dug deeper into it. This story is more about the future of creativity, and about who gets to shape it than it is about one guy who liked music.

Right now, we’re already using AI to write music, design buildings, and mimic human voices (eh sort of), but what happens when biology enters the mix and when we stop programming creativity and start growing it?

It’s not just that AI is getting weirder, it’s that we are, too. And as tech like this becomes more accessible, so does the question: what kind of legacies do we want to leave behind?

If you’ve ever recorded a song, written a poem, or built something with your hands, would you want it to keep going without you?And if so, how would you want it to sound? I feel like that’s the dream of any creator, to have their work outlive and outlast them once they’re gone. I certainly would.