It's too bad that technology in music refers to the means and not the ends.
E.g., pastiche techniques in Mahler, continually developing variations in Brahms. Even octatonicism in early Messiaen, or a 70s DJ moving his hand back and forth on a spinning vinyl and rhyming to its rhythm.
These are all things you can hear in the music that sound qualitatively different than music written without those techniques.
In the last excerpt from the article, I hear an upward portamento (smooth rising frequency ramp). But it's the same kind of portamento as one would get from classical digital synthesis/resynthesis, or even analog synthesis. It may technically be produced by a quantum computer, but it's not a "quantum portamento" in any musically significant sense.
However, maybe such a thing is possible. For example, one can adjust the partials in the 2nd pitch of a melody in such a way that the listener cannot easily tell whether that 2nd pitch is higher or lower than the first. One could then play a portamento extending from the 1st to 2nd pitch, and the direction of the portamento would reveal whether that 2nd pitch was indeed higher or lower. So in a way, "measuring" the interval distance with the portamento affects whether that 2nd pitch was higher or lower. :)
I co-authored a paper that was presented at the 2nd symposium mentioned in this article, and I’ve read the textbook mentioned in the article, happy to try to answer any questions
Would you say you approach this more from the educational side, or from the artistic one?
What about quantum circuits, and more complex gates (Hammond, ...). Do you think about "playing" a simple quantum circuit, hearing how the quantum state changes as it flows through the gates from start to end?
Thanks! We were originally thinking of approaching things more from the educational side, but it’s kind of a hard point to make without experimental evidence, which we don’t have.
As far as playing a quantum circuit through the end, that’s what our python and max implementations do! Should work with any gate; but because it’s simulation-based, there’s a limit to the number of qubits. We’re also working on a follow-up about sonifying arbitrary hamiltonians.
"If you are interested in a more in-depth introduction to the emerging field of Quantum Computer Music, I recommend the book, Quantum Computer Music: Foundations, Methods and Advanced Concepts, published by Springer in 2022."
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-13909-3
By the end of the day just another source of (quasi) random numbers which are somehow interpreted as music, isn't it?
> random numbers which are somehow interpreted as music
My initial reaction was similar. Nonetheless, I'm making an effort to embrace the diversity of what music can mean to different individuals. My only question to them is: are you genuinely moved by the music itself or do you "merely" intellectualize it?
That being said, is this emerging field of Quantum Computer Music solely focused on generating random numbers? I must admit I only glanced through the article, so I wouldn't assert this definitively.
> I'm making an effort to embrace the diversity of what music can mean to different individuals...
I'm a trained musician myself (see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1221) and I have also been exploring algorithmic composition for many years. There is no issue with diversity of what music can mean.
The issue is from my point of view, that a lot of effort is spent with different algorithmic concepts, but in the end, any area of the generated number range is arbitrarily mapped to MIDI notes. You can e.g. see that with the output of cellular automata (which are also used in the referenced book), where any random strip of the overall image is interpreted as notes. You could just as well have used a quasi-random generator. The use of cellular automata therefore brought no added value.
> is this emerging field of Quantum Computer Music solely focused on generating random numbers?
Whenever a new idea or technology became popular, a few resourceful people started making music with it. Now it's quantum computers. Over the years, many dissertations have been written that have not really brought any progress. I give transformer DNN a good chance, but good results are likely to be a few years away.
a lot of it does end up being that kind of thing, but not all. some of it’s kind of like how quantum math has been used to model (if I remember correctly) seismology or weather, and some of it’s about sonifying the entire quantum state, including superpositions (assuming no error/noise, the random part of quantum doesn’t happen until measurement, where superpositions are destroyed)
> some of it’s kind of like how quantum math has been used to model (if I remember correctly) seismology or weather, and some of it’s about sonifying the entire quantum state, including superpositions
Well, the field of quantum computing is definitely important and very promising, but it has as little to do with music like the proportions in the movements of celestial bodies.
> a more scientific term for such practice - "sonification"
Sonification is a very useful concept, e.g. to make the blood flow audible in medical ultrasound. But this is not the same as algorithmic composition, which is the topic here.
The author is right that there is nothing new about making music with AI. However, earlier uses of AI were for symbol manipulation, whereas currently AI has the potential to be a new kind of sound synthesis method. I’ve heard demos where sounds come from these interstitial regions of latent space and so it sounds like I’m listening to two things at once. I wonder if quantum computers will have the ability to do something similarly freaky.
It’s really cool to use quantum computers to compose music, but I’d love to see them used for things other than control of “frequency modulation (FM), additive synthesis, and granular synthesis.”
E.g., pastiche techniques in Mahler, continually developing variations in Brahms. Even octatonicism in early Messiaen, or a 70s DJ moving his hand back and forth on a spinning vinyl and rhyming to its rhythm.
These are all things you can hear in the music that sound qualitatively different than music written without those techniques.
In the last excerpt from the article, I hear an upward portamento (smooth rising frequency ramp). But it's the same kind of portamento as one would get from classical digital synthesis/resynthesis, or even analog synthesis. It may technically be produced by a quantum computer, but it's not a "quantum portamento" in any musically significant sense.
However, maybe such a thing is possible. For example, one can adjust the partials in the 2nd pitch of a melody in such a way that the listener cannot easily tell whether that 2nd pitch is higher or lower than the first. One could then play a portamento extending from the 1st to 2nd pitch, and the direction of the portamento would reveal whether that 2nd pitch was indeed higher or lower. So in a way, "measuring" the interval distance with the portamento affects whether that 2nd pitch was higher or lower. :)