How a Lab-Grown Mind Wrote Music Three Years After Its Composer Died
It sounds like science fiction…something born in a dream shared by Mary Shelley and a synth-pop band, but it’s real. 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. 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… good. It is.
But it’s also a glimpse into something deeper: a question about what creativity is, where it lives, and whether it can outlast us.
Let’s dive 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. 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 inhabit. He used brainwaves, room resonance, echolocation, and even the beating of his own heart to create soundscapes that were more science than song, more feeling than form.
He asked questions through music. What does a room sound like when it listens to itself? What happens 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. But that mind? It wasn’t finished speaking.
A Brain Reborn
In 2025, a project titled Revivification opened at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. The centerpiece? 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 science fiction anymore. 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. It wasn’t grown to be studied. It was grown to compose.
Twenty large brass plates surround the brain, receiving its signals and transforming them into sound via transducers and actuators. The result? A living, evolving composition…improvised by an entity that isn’t alive in the traditional sense.
It’s music, sure. But it’s also something more…a collaboration between biology, memory, and machine.
Who’s Really Composing?
Let’s pause for a second. 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…a continuation of the questions Lucier asked in life.
What is sound? What is 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.
And maybe that’s the most Lucier thing of all.
Memory, Music, and What’s Left Behind
This raises weird, beautiful questions.
Is there memory in tissue? Can creativity exist in fragments, reanimated and recontextualized? Is there a ghost in the machine, or is it just us, projecting?
We know cells hold more than just DNA. Epigenetics has shown that cells can remember trauma, respond to past environments, even carry emotional markers. So when Lucier’s cells fire in rhythm, are we hearing a song? Or a memory?
And what does it mean to let that memory be experienced, not through stories, or recordings, but through new, living expression?
It’s unsettling. But it’s also intimate.
This is no longer about preserving legacy. It’s about letting it evolve.
The Philosophy of Echoes
There’s something poetic in all this. Lucier spent his life exploring feedback loops, sound bouncing through space until it became something else. In this project, his mind has become its own loop, echoing not through a room, but through time.
What’s more poetic than a composer becoming the instrument?
And what does this say about creativity? That maybe it’s not as individual as we think. Maybe it’s something woven into our very cells, waiting for the right environment to bloom again.
Maybe inspiration is just energy. And energy, as science tells us, never really dies.
Not Just for Artists
This story isn’t just for music nerds or philosophers. It touches on everything from biotech to AI, memory to mourning.
It asks: what does it mean to be human in an age where parts of us can be cloned, regrown, and reanimated?
And it raises a more chilling thought: 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? To finish projects? To rule?
Or worse… to sell?
As Lucier’s brain composes, it forces us to listen, not just to music, but to the ethics humming underneath.
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.
Maybe, just maybe, our essence doesn’t need to be frozen in time.
Maybe it can become something new.
This is where the art world and biotech hold hands. Where spirituality and science meet on a gallery floor. Where grief becomes music.
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. Because this story is about the future of creativity, and about who gets to shape it.
Right now, we’re already using AI to write music, design buildings, and mimic human voices. But what happens when biology enters the mix? 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?
Internal Links:
Curious about how AI is reshaping the creative world? Check out this post on Grok 3.5 and the future of AI-generated answers.
Or, if you’re into the bizarre and brilliant ways brains work, read the story of how rats were taught to drive tiny cars.
Lucier’s posthumous collaboration with his own cells isn’t just experimental art, it’s a meditation on what it means to matter. To create. To persist.
The mini-brain doesn’t care if it’s being profound. It doesn’t care if it’s heard. But it speaks. And we, curious humans that we are, listen.
Because maybe somewhere in that shimmer of electric signal… there’s a piece of him still composing. Still wondering. Still becoming.
And maybe that’s the future—not just of music, but of meaning itself.
