Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more The history of popular music is, in part, a history of technology. From George Beauchamp inventing the electric guitar to whoever came up with the wobble bass that was briefly ubiquitous in dubstep, what we listen to has been shaped by inventive engineers. Feedback was therefore intrigued to receive a tip-off from reporter Karmela Padavic-Callaghan about “music-making on the future quantum Internet”.
Karmela directed our attention to a paper published on 5 August called “Teleportation game: Quantum teleportation in multi-agent systems for interactive music”. It was published in a scientific journal with the gloriously all-encompassing title International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems. It sees the researchers introduce “an interactive music system with quantum musical agents that communicate by teleporting quantum states to one another”.
Basically, you play a musical phrase or piece and the recording is given to a set of quantum computers. They then process it in some quantum way and output a modified version of the recording. Feedback isn’t going to pretend to understand what the quantum computers are doing.
The paper informs us that “melodic and rhythmic behaviours are encoded as quantum states using Single Qubit Probability Amplitude Modulation (SQPAM) and structured through Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE)”, and that up to three agents “are combined within a single quantum circuit, with directed communication via quantum teleportation”. Curious to know who came up with this, Feedback looked up the lead author.Eduardo Miranda is a composer and computer scientist who has created music using everything from brain-computer interfaces to slime moulds and, latterly, quantum computers. In 2024, he released an album called QUBISM, entirely created using quantum computers.
Feedback listened to a couple of tracks and was mildly bemused. Opener Lumina Grooves 1 is built around cheery xylophone-like notes: it sounds like something you would hear in an elevator or, perhaps, as background music for a wildlife documentary about marine invertebrates. In contrast, Spinnings uses eerie mechanical groans and could be an off-cut from the soundtrack to Blade Runner 2049.
We really wanted to know what the quantum musical agents in the new paper came up with, but the study doesn’t include any audio, so we don’t know. However, Feedback did note that the authors developed the agents to support “ambiguous, transformative interactions reminiscent of free Jazz improvisation” and that their system is one “in which divergence and ambiguity are tolerated”. To crib a line from the late, great Tom Lehrer, we think this means the quantum agents play a wrong note every now and then.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
