Cybernetic synth "cellF" played with "brain" made by culturing human skin cells

Cybernetic synthesizer "biological" which is neither digital nor analog, which cultivates human skin cells to create a biological neural network and controls "analogue modular synthesizer" in real time as "brain"CellF (self)"Was created. A movie for improvisation by cellF and jazz drummer has also been uploaded to YouTube.

This cybernetic synth contains a brain grown from the inventor's cells - CDM Create Digital Music
http://cdm.link/2017/05/cybernetic-synth-contains-brain-grown-inventors-cells/

Guy Ben-Ary, the developer of cellF, cultured the skin cells taken from her arm in the Symbiotic A laboratory at the University of Western Australia and transformed skin cells into stem cells using iPS cell technology . When stem cells begin to differentiate, they become neural stem cells, and completely differentiate into neural networks that operate on multi-electrode arrays. The differentiated neural network plays the role of Ben-Ary's "external brain" and functions as a processor of the synthesizer.

In this way, Ben-Ary names "biological circuitry that learns and responds via the intracellular logic and analog circuitry and designates it as a" wet analog circuit ". Whereas the human brain is a sophisticated and interactive complex structure formed of billions of neurons or more, the neuron network in a petri dish wired in an analog circuit is very simple, It is said that it will generate huge amount of data that is enough to play music.


For explanations on the structure of cellF and live with jazz drummer held in Tokyo in October 2016, it is possible to see from the following movie.
※ There are scenes showing the damaged part of the wrist which collected the skin tissue on the way, so please be careful when viewing poor people.

CellF - Video Documentation - YouTube


The world's first neural synthesizer "cellF"



Culture skin cells collected from Ben-Ary's arm ... ...


The "Rock Star" born in a petri dish is set in cell F and the performance begins.


In line with the rhythm that experimental percussionist Darren Moore hits, cellF plays a noisy melody.


All of Moore's instruments are wired to cellF, and the sound of the instrument is supplied to the neuron as electric stimulus. Because the neuron controls the synthesizer according to the electric stimulus, posthuman music could be played improvised.