Making Music Using Quantum Computers — The Music Of The Future

How can we make music using quantum computers? - An overview of a landmark performance at the Goethe-Institut, London using quantum music technology

On an evening on the 8th of December 2022, at the Goethe-Institut, London, a performance by pioneering quantum music technologist Eduardo Reck Miranda and his team revealed perhaps what the future of music could sound like. 

The event was one of the first live demos of quantum music software & a book launch by Eduardo Miranda, editor of the book “Quantum Computer Music: Foundations, Methods and Advanced Concepts”.

Writing in his piece in the publication Physics World about the performance, writer Philip Ball writes

“The Goethe-Institut, opposite Imperial College in London, is not the kind of place you would expect to encounter cutting-edge avant-garde art. With its Neoclassical façade and a history of providing German language classes, it hardly seems the type of venue to host an event that includes musicians like Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno, along with a number of quantum physicists.” 

“But the sounds emanating from its lecture theatre last December were a far cry from the institute’s traditional image: drones, bleeps and bursts of wild beats more akin to the soundtrack of an experimental underground movie.” 

“This was, in fact, the sound of quantum computing,” he adds. 

Music & technology have gone hand in hand ever since computing power began to emerge in the 70s. The initial pioneers of computing technology in the 70s and 80s saw the applications that technology could have in music & began to create several groundbreaking inventions that would form the basis of the music we know and make today. 

Taking things out of one box and putting them in another may seem like a mundane activity in its literal sense, but when it comes to creativity it’s the engine that drives the boundless innovations we see today.

“Creativity often comes when you take an idea from its original context and you move it somewhere else,” says Tim Harford in his TED Talk on Slow Motion Multi-tasking, which I’ve touched upon in a post on my Substack publication ‘Light Years’ that mirrors this Medium account. 

The creative boom in music technology was rather apparent in the 70s & 80s and the 60s and the electrification of the guitar was just the start. 

In the 70s, synthesizers, samplers & multi-track recording & the invention of drum machines in the 80s with more progress on the intersection of technology & music began the snowballing effect of the music technology revolution that would follow in the years since. 

This brief article on Find Your Sounds, charts the progression of music technology from the 70s up to modern day, in a concise & succinct piece highlighting the major advancements through the decades. 

Around sometime last year, I was engrossed in reading Brian Eno’s book or diary rather, titled — ‘A Year With Swollen Appendices’. I’ve touched upon the part from the book where he envisioned Ambient Music in an old piece(linked below).

But writing about one of the world’s first DAWs i.e. the Koan made by the company SSEYO, in his book, in the chapter titled ‘Generative Music’, Eno writes:

“In early 1995 I received from them[SSEYO] a CD of music that had been made by their software program called Koan. A couple of the pieces were clearly in ‘my’ style”

“I contacted Tim Cole at SSEYO, and he arranged for me to get a copy of the Koan ‘authoring tool’ — the program by which one writes the rules for these pieces — and, after a few days of typical interface frustration, I took to it like a duck to water.”

…..

“Some of the works I’ve made with Koan sound to me as good as anything I’ve done. That’s important: they work as music and are not — as so much computer-based art has been — just a ‘neat idea’. They also symbolize to me the beginning of a new era in music.” 

“Until 100 years ago every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable, and even classical scoring couldn’t guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again.” 

“But Koan and other recent experiments like it are the beginning of something new.”

“From now on there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music, it is always different. Like recorded music, it is free of time-and-place limitations — you can hear it when you want and where you want.” 

“And it confers one of the other great advantages of the recorded form: it can be composed empirically. By this I mean that you can hear it as you work it out — it doesn’t suffer from the long feedback loop characteristic of scored-and-performed music.”

Excerpt From: Brian Eno. “A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary” —  Apple Books

Of course, we now know ‘Generative Music’ as being simply the music made on a DAW on a laptop, but this account was from back in 1995.

Fast forward to 2022 and Brian Eno was present in the audience during Eduardo Miranda’s performance at the Goethe-Institut London. 

The underlying basis of quantum computing is that, by and large, information and processing happens at the subatomic level that is encoded in varied states of superposition of entangled qubits. This is far more complex than a conventional computers’ circuits and furthermore allows processing, calibration and calculation to be made much more powerfully and efficiently as compared to computers we know of today.

“What I want to develop is machines that will help me to be creative and will challenge my own way of doing things. The more intelligence I can model in these machines the more these machines will push me to the other direction.” 

“What are the kinds of things that I can do that I would do different with a quantum computer?” 

“The main difference between your quantum computer and a classical computer is the unity of information and processing of a quantum computer operates at the subatomic level —  the qubit which is the equivalent of the bit in the classical computer  can have values or states if you like that are between 0 and 1 and also 0 and 1 at the same time —  but there are grades so it can be more 0 or more 1 depending on how you you program it.” 

“It promotes a different way of thinking when you program these computers and I believe that there is a different way of thinking also will lead to different ways of thinking about music and this is what we are you know giving a glimpse of what is to come in these performances,” says Eduardo Miranda. 

According to Gosia Cabaj, the Head of Information Services at the Goethe-Institut, London the performance was a landmark one, as she reflects on how art can help us further understand technology and vice-versa.

“Tonight’s event is kind of special because in a sense it’s not as much about what can art do for Quantum Computing, it’s rather how can Quantum Computing help us discover a whole new landscape in classical music.”

“How can art and culture help us understand emerging technologies and maybe how can art and culture sort of trouble the way we think and talk about emerging technologies such as Quantum Computing?”

“But the interesting thing about talking about Quantum Computing right now and talking about this intersection of culture, art and Quantum Computing is I guess that we’re at the stage of development of technology where we as society can still impact the way it’s going to go forward at the Goethe-Institut we do believe that art can play a very important role in this conversation”, says Gosia Cabaj. 

In the demonstration, bifurcated into two parts, Eduardo Miranda and his team demo two ways in which his quantum computer makes music. 

In the first, it listens to an input from a violin player & then learns and outputs sounds in real-time based on what it has learnt and understood from the violin players’ music. 

“The particular computer that I’m using for the performance tonight is provided by IBM Quantum and those machines are based in New York. When Craig plays the violin the computer is listening we represent that as Quantum States the machine evaluates those States and gives responses back which is converted back to music and all this happens in real time.” 

“And this is fundamentally different from the methods that artificial intelligence does this in classical machines,” adds Miranda

The violin player Craig Stratton on his two cents about the computer’s final output sound after listening to the motifs he plays on the violin says, 

“It’s producing quite interesting results because the computer is figuring out the motifs and trying to repeat something very similar.

“It’s not something that I feel I can label at the moment it doesn’t fit into any particular box.” 

“I don’t think it’ll ever replace you know traditional classical music but it certainly has a place in musical development you know how do we grow how do we develop if we don’t explore other other avenues?”

The second demonstration comprises another quantum music software instrument, called the Q1 Synth — based on a paper by Eduardo Miranda. 

The software is controlled by a VR-glove controller (akin to a MIDI controller) that is connected to the computer and is visually represented as a Bloch sphere — which represents the qubit. 

You can check it out & play around with it yourself here(linked below):

Q1Synth - ICCMR
Quantum computing model applied to sound synthesis. Designed and built by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer…iccmr-q1synth-proto.cephasteom.co.uk

The VR glove is rotated, which in turn rotates the Bloch sphere until Miranda and his team make a “measurement” of a “state” on the sphere. The sound that is outputted depends on the measurement of the state in the Bloch sphere. 

“The sound that results will always be surprising,” “We don’t know what it will be until we do the measurement,” says Miranda.

But there are limitations to this tech, as Philip Ball writes in Physics World:

“Publicly available quantum computing resources are, however, relatively limited, so Miranda is restricted to using a seven-qubit, cryogenically-cooled IBM Quantum device housed in New York, accessed via the cloud. Miranda admits that there is nothing, so far, in the quantum algorithms he uses to craft his compositions that couldn’t also be simulated with a classical computer. “For now we’re doing [quantum music] in a very naïve way because the machines are limited,” adds Coecke.

“Still, as Miranda explains, some of the algorithms he is developing would already be computationally expensive and slow on classical devices, and hard to implement live in real time in a concert. But speed of computation is not really the main issue when it comes to using quantum physics to compose music. Currently the big appeal of quantum algorithms is, rather, as a source of randomness in musical choices.”

This ‘randomness’ turns out to be rather interesting to me because (as per my understanding), music produced using this quantum technology would be new and different every time it’s listened to based on the ‘measurement’ and ‘state’ of the qubit.

From a futuristic perspective(again as per my two cents), perhaps every song made & recorded using quantum computers would be inherently the same as produced but slightly different every time it’s played or listened to. That seems like something rather intriguing to me because music will never be the exact same piece it was produced or recorded as, and new every time it is listened to by a listener if it does pan out to occur in this way— maybe some kind of new online quantum music player that allows this to happen. 

Brian Eno added his bit of feedback and thoughts on the performance wherein he says, 

“I’m fascinated to know how [this music] works,” 

“It’s difficult for me to make a judgement, because you don’t know how much of those decisions were made by humans, and how much is coming out of that different kind of intelligence,” said Brian Eno after the performance.

In the video on the YouTube channel ‘Sounding Qubits’ about this groundbreaking and landmark performance by Eduardo Miranda and his team, you can hear the sounds produced by quantum computers and get first-hand accounts from Miranda and the people involved in hosting and listening to this performance, which is perhaps the first step and stepping stone towards what the music of the future could sound like. 

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