Sonic revival The late composer making music via a lab-grown brain

In a darkened room, a fractured symphony of rattles, hums and warbles bounces off the walls - like an orchestra tuning up in some parallel universe. But there's not a musician in sight.

- Rosamund Brennan

If you look closely there is a small fragment of a performer. Albeit one without a pulse. In the centre of the room, visitors hover round a raised plinth, craning to glimpse the brains behind the operation. Under a magnifying lens sit two white blobs, like tiny jellyfish. Together, they form the lab-grown "mini-brain" of the late US musician Alvin Lucier - composing a posthumous score in real time.

Lucier was a pioneer of experimental music who died in 2021. But here in the Art Gallery of Western Australia he has been resurrected with neuroscience.

"When you look down into that central plinth, you're crossing a threshold," says Nathan Thompson, an artist and a creator of the project, titled Revivification. "You're peering down into the abyss and you're looking at something that's alive - just not in the same way as you."

Revivification is the work of a self-described "four-headed monster", a team of scientists and artists who have spent decades pushing the boundaries of biological art - namely Thompson and his fellow artists Guy Ben-Ary and Matt Gingold, alongside a neuroscientist, Stuart Hodgetts.

Lucier was the ideal collaborator. In 1965 the composer became the first artist to use brainwaves to generate live sound in his seminal work Music for Solo Performer.