Cortical Echoes
Amy Karle & Eduardo Reck Miranda
2026
Cortical Echoes: An Interface for Living Computation is a live performance-installation by Amy Karle and Eduardo Reck Miranda that transforms living neural activity into music, synthetic speech, and responsive visual environments. Bridging bioart, biological computing, AI, neuroscience, and experimental media, the project makes emerging forms of living intelligence publicly experiential, ethically legible, and culturally resonant.
Working with living neurons cultured on multi-electrode arrays, the project creates a three-way dialogue between human performers, digital translation systems, and living neural activity, transforming biological signals into evolving music, synthetic speech, and responsive visual environments.
The work uses musical input mapped to stimulation patterns inspired by the tonotopic organization of the auditory cortex. Neuronal responses are captured as spike activity and translated into audiovisual form, including sound structures, speech synthesis, raster-based visualizations, and immersive light environments. What emerges is not a representation of intelligence, but an encounter with living computation as process, variability, relation, and response.
Cortical Echoes explores how creativity, agency, and authorship shift when the responding system is alive. It asks how biological intelligence, machine systems, and human intention might co-create, and what kinds of ethical, aesthetic, and cultural frameworks are needed as post-silicon forms of intelligence begin to enter public life. The project positions art as a civic and sensory interface for emerging biocomputing, making frontier research experiential, visible, and open to reflection.
Musical Output from Neuronal Culture
Synthetic Speech Output from Neuronal Culture
Selected visual outputs from Cortical Echoes: An Interface for Living Computation, an art-lab performance that operates as a biological computing system using living neural networks cultured on multi-electrode arrays. Neural spike activity is recorded, interpreted, and translated in real time into generative music, synthetic speech, and responsive visual environments, forming a closed-loop interface between biological and computational processes. These images trace that continuum, from microscopy of neuronal tissue and electrophysiological data to emergent audiovisual forms and the performative environment, making living computation perceptible, legible, and experientially accessible.
SELECTED RESEARCH & SCIENTIFIC CONTEXT
Cortical Echoes: An Interface for Living Computation emerges through artistic research and interdisciplinary inquiry across biological computing, neural interfaces, unconventional computation, AI music, and experimental media. The project builds on decades of research into in vitro neuronal networks, bioelectrical signaling, adaptive learning in living neural systems, and computational approaches that move beyond conventional silicon-based models. The references below offer selected context for the project’s research lineage, conceptual framework, and technological basis. Eduardo Miranda’s long-standing research in unconventional computing and sound is central to this foundation, alongside selected publications from Cortical Labs and related scientific work in biological neural networks.
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- Miranda, E. R., Bull, L., Gueguen, F., & Uroukov, I. S. (2009). Computer Music Meets Unconventional Computing: Towards Sound Synthesis with In Vitro Neuronal Networks. Computer Music Journal, 33(1), 9–18.
- Miranda, E. R., Adamatzky, A., & Jones, J. (2011). Sounds Synthesis with Slime Mould of Physarum Polycephalum. Journal of Bionic Engineering, 8(2), 107–113.
- Miranda, E. R. (2021). Handbook of Artificial Intelligence for Music. Springer Nature Switzerland.
- Kagan, B. J. et al. (2022). In Vitro Neurons Learn and Exhibit Sentience When Embodied in a Simulated Gameworld. Neuron.
- Hogan, D. et al. (2026). CL API: Real-Time Closed-Loop Interactions with Biological Neural Networks. arXiv:2602.11632.
- Kagan, B. J. (2025). The CL1 as a Platform Technology to Leverage Biological Neural System Functions. Nature Reviews Bioengineering.
PROJECT SCOPE
Developed across biocomputing, artificial intelligence, experimental music, bioart, biodesign, neuroscience, new media art, and computational media,
Cortical Echoes is designed for performance in museums, biennials, festivals, and research-driven public platforms.Â
It brings together Eduardo Reck Miranda’s pioneering work in AI music, brain-computer music interfacing, and biological computing for sound with
Amy Karle’s practice in biofeedback, bioart, AI, visual systems, and ethical inquiry.
Together, the project proposes a new artistic and cultural interface for creativity and living intelligence.
CREDITS & SUPPORT
Conceived and developed by Amy Karle and Eduardo Reck Miranda
Visual art and design: Amy Karle
Music and speech systems: Eduardo Reck Miranda
Software development: Moein Fahmideh Vatandoost
Developed with support from the University of Plymouth, Cortical Labs, and Conceptual Art Technologies
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