Quantum Computer Music
ctm-festival.de
ctm-festival.de
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. :)
The paper we wrote isn’t on airxiv yet but can be read here: https://github.com/sporkl/superposition-rhythms/blob/main/is...
Two 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?
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.
By the end of the day just another source of (quasi) random numbers which are somehow interpreted as music, isn't it?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”