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The idea came from a conversation with physicist Edmond Dewan, who studied alpha rhythms for the US Air Force: he was investigating why slowly spinning propellers fall into step with pilots' brain waves and cause dizziness and loss of consciousness. Dewan's subjects had learned to control the amplitude of their alpha waves, tapping out Morse code onto a teletype.

Alvin Lucier dropped the code — and took the waves themselves as sound. Working alone with medical EEG gear (Tektronix preamplifiers, a Krohn-Hite band-pass filter), he learned to switch his alpha rhythm on by shifting his attention, and noticed that the low-frequency signal made the speaker cones physically vibrate.

Here the loudspeaker works as a drumstick. The signal from the electrodes is split into channels and fed to speakers pressed flush against gongs, timpani, cymbals, cardboard boxes and trash cans — their membranes tremble and hum. The performer's body has nothing to do with it: everything hangs on a state. Open your eyes — the alpha rhythm fades, the sound is gone. By Lucier's own account, the piece is about acoustic resonance as much as brain waves.

At the premiere, Lucier sat wired with electrodes while John Cage spent 40 minutes manually routing his brain signal across sixteen “speaker–instrument” pairs. Out of this came the paradox that would underpin all of Lucier’s later music: for sound to emerge, the performer must stop performing.