--- title: "Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music" description: "Using the DNA of the late musician Alvin Lucier, a team has created an \"in-vitro brain\" that still creates music with its electrical signals." date: "2025-04-12" modified: "2025-04-12" authors: - name: "Frank Landymore" job_title: "Contributing Writer" link: "https://futurism.com/authors/flandymore" url: "https://futurism.com/neoscope/musician-resurrected-brain-new-music" categories: - "Brain" - "Health & Medicine" - "Neuroscience and Brain" tags: - "artificial brain" - "brain" - "music" --- # Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music ![Using the DNA of the late musician Alvin Lucier, a team has created an "in-vitro brain" that still creates music with its electrical signals.]() *\Image: Getty / Futurism\* Art can outlast the artist — but what about their artistic impulses? A new art installation project in Australia, titled "Revivification," raises this question with a very literal interpretation of "impulse": using his DNA, the team behind the project have performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals. "Revivification is an attempt to shine light on the sometimes dark possibilities of extending a person's presence beyond the seemed finality of death," the team, comprising three artists and a neuroscientist, [told the *Art Newspaper*](). At the center of the piece is an "in-vitro brain," grown from blood that Lucier, who passed away in 2021, donated in the final years of his life. Housed in a plinth, it's grown on top of an electrode mesh that connects it to twenty large brass plates placed around the room. Visitors can listen as the brain fires off electrical pulses that trigger a transducer and a mallet behind each plate, striking them to produce sound. "When you look down into that central plinth, you're crossing a threshold," Nathan Thompson, an artist and the creator of the project, [told the *Guardian*]() in a recent interview. "You're peering down into the abyss and you're looking at something that's alive – just not in the same way as you." To create the "mini-brain," researchers at Harvard Medical School used Lucier's white blood cells to derive [stem cells](), the foundational building blocks of the body which possess the ability to develop into any type of cell or tissue, such as that belonging to a particular organ. For the project, the team chose to program the stem cells to grow into cerebral organoids, resembling the cells of a developing human brain. Of course, lab-grown creation doesn't amount to [anything like human consciousness](). Still, it is on some level an extension of Lucier, responding to the world around it: in addition to generating sound, the cerebral organoids receive sound picked up by microphones in the gallery, mediated as electrical signals. "The central question we want people to ask is: could there be a filament of memory that persists through this biological transformation? Can Lucier's creative essence persist beyond his death?" the team said, per the *Art Newspaper*. Lucier eagerly participated in this experiment. As the *Guardian* notes, he was the first to innovate the use of [brainwaves to create live music](), attaching electrodes to his head to pick up brain signals that were amplified into a loudspeaker. "When I told Lucier's daughter Amanda about the project, she laughed," Guy Ben-Ary, one of the artist collaborators, told the *Guardian*. "She thought, this is so my dad. Just before he died he arranged for himself to play for ever. He just can't go. He needs to keep playing." **More on brains:** *[Scientists Intrigued by Man Whose Brain Turned Into Glass]()* ## Author At Futurism, my work has often centered on bringing a sense of clarity and insight to complex topics ranging from the regulation of emerging technologies to the esoteric ideologies of Silicon Valley executives, while striving not to lose the poetic sense of awe inspired by often-obscure fields like astrophysics and quantum computing. I broke the story of CNET using AI to produce articles that turned out to be riddled with factual errors and plagiarism — a dam-breaking inflection point, as I've reported, that's inspired copycats and endless discourse while beguiling stakeholders ranging from tech giants to purveyors of spam around the web. My work at Futurism has been cited by publications including CBS News, the Los Angeles Times, Vice, Gizmodo, Engadget, the Verge, and Vanity Fair. I grew up in locales ranging from India to China, and now live in the exotic suburbs of Virginia. In my free time, I'm an avid reader of weird sci-fi literature, an aficionado of East Asian cinema, and, regrettably, a relapsed gamer. Allegedly, I’m working on a debut novel, currently untitled. ### Author social links [Bluesky]()