By Leslie Katz, Senior Contributor Oct 4, 2024,09:00am EDT Updated Oct 4, 2024, 12:16pm EDT
Eduardo Reck Miranda’s musical composition “Qubism” features violin, viola, cello, flute, trombone, marimba — and quantum computing.
The classically trained composer and professor of computer music at England’s Plymouth University integrated pauses into his score where a quantum computer running an AI model he’d trained could respond in real time to one of the instruments, the violin, with synthesized saxophone and percussion. The result is a futuristic improvisation that sounds different every time the composition plays.
The piece for chamber orchestra and electronic sounds appears on Miranda’s upcoming new album, also called Qubism. He created all compositions on it using quantum computing to showcase the emerging technology’s potential as a tool that could unlock new realms of creating and experiencing music.
“I believe this is the first ever album composed using AI and quantum computing technology,” Miranda said. The electronic-music label 51beats will release a version for streaming and download on Oct. 25 (for € 7.5, or about $8.25), with a vinyl version featuring different tracks available at select events, “because it’s fashionable to get a vinyl,” Miranda said.
At times, the three-piece composition “Qubism” pulsates with a shrill, dissonant urgency, at other times the sounds soften and elongate only to be suddenly, and whimsically, punctured by an eerie, otherworldly sequence that evokes visions of aliens disembarking spaceships. Below, you can hear the second movement of “Qubism,” which appears on the album’s vinyl version only. At 4:15, a violin plays a solo. The quantum computer listens to that segment, and at 4:33, it responds with a saxophone sound that lasts until 5:23.
When the forward-looking London Sinfonietta performed “Qubism” on a U.K. stage last year, it did so with the help of a quantum computer almost 3,500 miles away in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., at the global headquarters of IBM’s research and development division.
To execute their extraordinary calculations, quantum computers need to be kept inside large cooling devices to prevent them from overheating. IBM’s machine, therefore, couldn’t be easily transported across continents to improvise with the “Qubism” violinist. But it offered computational complexity Miranda couldn’t have gotten from any computer at Plymouth’s center for computer music research.
“This sort of thing is not possible with the traditional AI that we have because you need a lot of power and you need a lot of time for the machine to process the information that goes in,” Miranda said, sitting in front of a computer monitor at Stochastic Labs, an incubator for creative scientists and engineers in Berkeley, Calif., where Miranda spent the month of August.
“Currently, I am banking on these emerging larger quantum computers with hundreds of qubits to develop a system to interact live with a whole orchestra with dozens of instruments, not only the violin,” Miranda added. Quantum computers use qubits as the basic unit of information rather than the bits found in standard computers.
Quantum computing harnesses quantum mechanics, the study of how particles behave at the atomic and subatomic level, to process information in fundamentally different ways than even the most powerful classical computer. It’s been demonstrated that quantum computers can solve certain complex problems, drug discovery for example, at speeds exponentially faster than those of regular computers. In 2019, Google claimed its Sycamore quantum processor performed, in just 200 seconds, an arcane numerical generation task that would have taken a classical computer 10,000 years to complete.
Quantum Start-Up Eyes The Arts
In addition to his role at Plymouth University, Miranda serves as a scientific adviser for Moth Quantum, a London-based start-up that aims to bridge the worlds of quantum technology and creative practice in the arts, gaming and music.
“The way that he thinks about the music that he produces is just incredibly unique,” Moth Quantum co-founder and CEO Ferdi Tomassini said in an interview. “Artists always act as a sort of first experimenter to try new technologies.”
At Stochastic, Miranda demonstrated how he’s working with a beta version of a new Moth Quantum tool to compose a piece he plans to call “Positive Phototaxis” in homage to Moth (positive phototaxis means movement in response to light, a behavior seen in moths). The tool, called Actias Synth, is a qubit-enabled software sound synthesizer that lets musicians interact with real quantum processing to create new audio.
Miranda collborates with Actias wearing bespoke gloves designed in his Plymouth lab that translate hand gestures into control parameters to constantly change sounds by manipulating qubits, visualized on screen as a sphere. He composed the trippy piece below, “Swirling Qubits,” using the tool.
Later this year, Moth Quantum plans to release an open-source toolkit that empowers musicians to create audio effects plug-ins powered by quantum computing. The company, which brings together scientists, entrepreneurs and creatives, was founded in 2022 and came out of stealth mode at the beginning of this year.
“We believe that quantum will lead to a transformative intellectual and cultural movement,” the start-up said in a statement.
Quantum computing promises to do everything from transform financial and manufacturing industries to reduce damage from climate change. While it has yet to fully realize its many promises, the technology is already generating huge interest, with $55 billion in global investments as of June.
“Over the next five years it will become much more fully integrated across a lot of things,” said Tomassini. Prior to joining Moth Quantum, Ferdi worked at quantum computing company Quantinuum, which formed in 2021 when Cambridge Quantum and Honeywell Quantum Solutions merged.
When AI Meets Quantum Computing
Artificial intelligence, of course, has already permeated the arts, with visual artists and musicians experimenting with generative AI tools that can be prompted to instantly produce images, videos or songs. These products typically rely on datasets trained on massive amounts of existing material, an approach that has generated anxiety among some artists, who worry their work is being vacuumed up without credit or compensation.
Miranda said he and the Moth team are looking toward a different AI model, one that doesn’t comb large datasets to produce pastiches, but instead relies on a more focused approach.
For “Qubism,” as an example, the system produced musical responses to the violin solely by listening to specific sections he’d composed for the instrument.
“I am interested in systems that are more personal to a creator, systems that adapt to the way in which particular musicians work, and interact with them as partners in the creative process,” Miranda said. “Hence, we do not need to train them with huge amounts of data, but only with data that matters.”
Story originally featured on Forbes.com
Leslie Katz Senior Contributor|Science
Journalist Leslie Katz, a Forbes contributor since October 2023, covers science and consumer technology, often focusing on how they overlap with art and creativity. She’s the former culture editor at news and tech website CNET, where she led a team that tracked movies, TV shows, online trends and science—from space and robotics to climate and archaeology. Her byline has also appeared in publications including The New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle and J, the Jewish News of Northern California. When she’s not wrangling words, Leslie’s probably gardening or yoga-ing. Follow her to keep up with the latest in AI-generated art and surprising scientific finds.
