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Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
Plenty of us would find it difficult to compose a new piece of music under any circumstances, even in the prime of our lives. But experimental composer Alvin Lucier is making music from beyond the grave—at least in a manner of speaking.
In a museum in Australia, a recent exhibition allowed visitors to hear sounds generated by neurons grown using the late artist’s blood. The exhibit raised questions about both consciousness and creativity and teased at what becomes possible when art meets cutting-edge neuroscience.
Here to tell us more about this musically prolific petri dish is Scientific American associate editor Allison Parshall.
Allison, so great to have you back with us.
Allison Parshall: Thank you for having me.
Feltman: So what are we gonna talk about today?
Parshall: Today, we’re going to talk about some experimental music. What do you know about experimental music? What do you think of when you think about it?
Feltman: I definitely think of John Cage first. I’m probably—I, I wouldn’t say I’m an experimental-music fan, but between having a sister who’s an opera singer and having done a little bit of modern dance in college with a teacher who loved Merce Cunningham, I guess [laughs] I probably know a little bit more than average. But yeah, I feel like John Cage is, like, the guy.
Parshall: Tell me a little bit about what you think about with John Cage.
Feltman: I mean, it’s hard not to think of 4’33” first, his piece that is simply the ambient silence of a room with an orchestra in it not playing.
Parshall: Peak experimental.
Feltman: Yeah, peak experimental. And also I feel like there’s been some great discourse and argument over, like, what constitutes a valid performance of 4’33” [laughs] and, like, what pollutes it. The sound of somebody texting—is that an okay thing to have [laughs] in a performance of 4’33”? That’s what comes to mind, for sure.
Parshall: So, like, the most experimental you can get: There is no music, or is that music …
Feltman: Right, yeah.
Parshall: Even if there is nothing? Yeah, I definitely think about 4’33”, also, the most, and he premiered that in 1952. And it was around that era that some experimental musicians were starting to probe into, like, the very nature of sound itself and what counts as music. And there was this one composer—not John Cage—whose work was so methodical it was almost scientific. He actually used his brain to make music back in the 1960s, and I have been utterly fascinated by this story for the past few months, so I’m very excited to get to tell you about it.
Feltman: I’m excited to hear about it.
Parshall: So let me set the scene for you: In Perth, Australia, there’s an art museum with a haunting musical exhibit. You start at the mouth of this dark, narrow hallway. It curves in front of you, getting wider as it goes, like the cochlea structure in your inner ear. The hallway is lined with these square-shaped brass plates that periodically vibrate with sound. The sound is a little bit different in every place that you stand in the room because the sound waves are coming from the plates and interacting with each other differently throughout the space.
No moment is the same as the last, and sitting at the center of the room is a brass plinth under a spotlight. At the top of the plinth, there’s a clear window, and you walk over, and you look down, and you see a small dish with a blob that’s just a few millimeters across.
These are brain cells, and they come from the legendary experimental composer Alvin Lucier. He’s dead; he passed away in 2021. But you’re surrounded by music that originates from this little organlike structure. It’s called an organoid.
The process of making this started with Alvin’s own blood cells, which were transformed into stem cells, which were then turned into neuronal cells like those in the brain. Those brain cells fire, sending electrical impulses that cause hammers behind each of the brass plates to strike. Microphones then pick up that sound—and any sound that you might be making while you’re in the exhibit—and feed that information as electrical signals back into Alvin’s brain organoid.
This exhibit is called Revivification for what it attempts to do: revivify Alvin—or at least some part of him.
Feltman: Wow, that’s very weird and kind of spooky, and I feel like probably has led to a lot of debate over how it fits into his portfolio as an experimental composer. I guess the first piece of information to know to get into that debate is: Did he know this was gonna happen? Did he plan for this? Did he …
Parshall: Yeah.
Feltman: Compose the situation?
Parshall: He was super aware that this was happening. In fact, it was his idea, or at least in part his idea, according to his collaborators on the project.
So I spoke with the other artists and the neuroscientists who were involved in the exhibit, as well as one of Alvin’s former colleagues. I also spoke with his daughter, Amanda Lucier; she’s a photojournalist based in Portland. And here’s what she had to say on the subject.
Amanda Lucier: There was something about the way that he was that made him think and made you think that he was never gonna die. That makes me smile, thinking about how he pulled off continuing to work and continuing to be a part of the world of experimental music quite literally after his death. I mean, if anyone was gonna pull off immortality, it was him.
Parshall: The story of Revivification, in many ways, actually starts a whole century ago with the invention of the EEG, or the electroencephalogram.
Feltman: I had one of those once. It was kind of anticlimactic because the process of preparing for it is so dramatic: you get the cap with all the electrodes, and they, like, use this weird paste to stick it to your head. Then the actual test is just you kind of sitting there existing while a computer does something that you can’t see—though I do remember that the goop does stay in your hair, so that’s a fun thing that happens [laughs].
Parshall: I imagine that’s no fun to wash out, but I’ve never had one before. But they seem kind of cool, if you said anticlimactic.
An EEG, what it does is measures the electrical activity from the brain from outside the skull, and it’s using, like you mentioned, those electrodes that are placed all over the head. And what it’s so good at is capturing real-time information from the brain. So it can capture waves of activity as networks of neurons fire in concert with one another. Those waves of activity, they travel at different speeds. So gamma waves are the fastest. They happen when you’re really focused or thinking about something. Delta are the slowest, and those happen when you’re in, like, a dreamless sleep. And alpha waves, they happen when you’re in a relaxed but awake state, like during meditation.
So when EEG was first invented, roughly a hundred years ago, it allowed for the very first recordings of the live human brain, like, living brain activity. And so, of course, neuroscientists were all over it as a tool for unpacking what is actually going on in the brain as we do different activities. Before, they just kinda had to wait for you to die, and then look what it looked like.
In the 1960s, it caught the attention of Alvin, who was then a composer on the faculty at Brandeis University. He was feeling uninspired in his work at the time, but he was totally taken by this technology.
Alpha brain waves are too low in frequency to be heard by the human ear. We can hear down to, like, 20 hertz, or 20 waves per second. And these waves, alpha brain waves, are generally, like, 10 hertz. But Alvin’s colleagues wanted him to record the waves and then manipulate them into something that humans could hear and then use that audio to create a composition. But he was not interested in that at all. What he wanted to do was far more interesting and experimental.
Parshall: He developed a piece called “Music for Solo Performer.” Alvin would sit in a chair with EEG electrodes on, in front of an audience, and try to meditate. If he was successful, the low-frequency alpha brain waves would be picked up by the electrodes, amplified and then played through speakers that are positioned throughout the room. The waves would still be inaudible, but directly in front of the speakers would be percussion instruments—such as gongs and cymbals, bass drums, timpanis—and the sound waves would cause them to vibrate along with the speakers, producing audible noise that the audience could hear.
There was something really scientific about the way that Alvin approached composition. Here’s Susan Leigh Foster. She’s a close colleague and friend of Alvin and his family. A dance professor for years, she taught with Alvin at Wesleyan University, where he spent most of his career.
Susan Leigh Foster: This would be maybe the most important thing I could say about Alvin [laughs]: he liked setting up conditions, or forces, that would then produce sound. In that way, he really bears a lot of similarity to the way that scientific work is done. Like, you have a hypothesis. You set up the experiment. You conduct the experiment.
You know, what if you take a sound and send it down a long wire and then amplify that and then watch as it changes over the hours as the room temperature keeps changing and as people come into the room and as air currents change, or what if you bury speakers underground, which is a project he did at Dartmouth.
Parshall: Alvin was always listening and observing. Here’s his daughter again.
Lucier: I remember being mortified as a middle-school student going into a Pier 1 Imports with some friends, and there was a vacuum going, and he would match the tone of the vacuum to see if he could create beading patterns. So he’d be in the corner there, going, like: [hums note]. And now, in retrospect, I think, “Oh, wow, that was really cool for me to have that experience.” And at the time, I was like, “Oh, my God, Dad, even in the Pier 1 Imports.” [Laughs.]
Parshall: Over the course of his career, Alvin became a well-known and respected experimental composer. Guy Ben-Ary, one of the artists responsible for Revivification, admired him greatly.
Guy Ben-Ary: I mean, Alvin was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was not part of kind of popular culture and not part of the group of classical composers that, you know, [were] very famous. They say that he was the composer’s composer.
Parshall: When Guy first encountered Alvin’s work in the late 2000s, it inspired him to bring sound into his artwork. So then he embarked on creating what he called a sort of unconventional, quote, “self-portrait.”
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