Live now · Fly Radio
Four shows, five flies, the real 166,700-neuron MaleCNS connectome — running live in your browser, the same brain files as the Simulation. Every buzz you hear is that brain's own wing-motor-neuron activity, played the instant it's measured: nothing is pre-rendered, nothing loops.
The lineup
No new neuron-population mappings were invented for radio: each show just points a fixed
real stimulus context (the same ones flytalk.py uses) at a live copy of the brain, for as long
as you listen.
baseline, no stimulus. Actual hiss, no tone — the resting activity of an undriven
fly brain, with the carrier turned off entirely so it reads as static rather than a quiet buzz.
threat (LC4 + LPLC2, looming). True crime, fly-sized: a real looming-detection circuit,
live, reacting to something closing in.
food (ORN_DM1 + ORN_DM2). One fly, one plate, zero chill — real odour-receptor
neurons doing the reviewing.
A talk show, baseline / mate (LC10a): the mic alternates between a presenter
and an expert, 2.5 s and 4 s at a time, on a loop. Both flies keep running the whole time.
How it works
Nobody programmed this brain and nobody scripted the show. Only the sonification — how loudness becomes a tone — is a made-up choice, same honesty as this project's other demos.
Each cast member of the show you tune to is its own copy of the brain, running on your device. Each gets its show's real stimulus injected into the real neurons that carry it, on every 20 ms step — nothing scripted, timed, or scored.
Every step, the page measures how hard that fly's real wing-motor neurons fire above rest. That one real number amplitude-modulates a synthetic ~190 Hz tone so it's audible — the only invented ingredient.
A small cross-validated classifier, calibrated on the real contexts, is handed a rolling window of a cast member's real measured envelope — no label attached — and guesses which context it resembles. Often wrong, on purpose: it's a real decode, not an echo.
Read on