Welcome to QuTune Project pages
The QuTune Project is aimed at creating resources for making music with quantum computing, and making quantum computing with music.
Quantum computing is a nascent technology, which is advancing rapidly.
There is a long history of research into using computers for music since the 1950s. Nowadays computers are essential for the music economy. Thus, it is very likely that quantum computers will be used in the music industry in the time to come.
A new area of research and development is emerging: Quantum Computer Music.
Historically, it is fair to compare state-of-the-art (i.e., at the time of this writing, 2021) quantum computers with the computer mainframes of the 1950s. And it must have been hard for our forefathers of the last century to predict how computers would evolve. For example, in 1977, Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s) allegedly said: “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”. Yet, we wear computers on the wrist today.
It is equally hard nowadays to imagine how computers will be like in 2090. But in contrast to 70 years ago, however, today’s musicians are generally conversant with computers and programming. So, the time is ripe for musicians to start experimenting with quantum computing in music, and play an active role in the development of this fascinating technology. There is every reason to believe that quantum computers will do wonders for musical creativity. Hence the QuTune project.
This page is a portal to programming tools, demonstrations, publications and other materials produced by the QuTune team.
QuTune kick-started in the Spring of 2021 thanks to a 12 months long grant awarded by the UK National Quantum Technologies Programme’s QCS Hub to Eduardo R. Miranda (Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Rearch (ICCMR), University of Plymouth, UK) and Bob Coecke (Quantinuum, Oxford, UK).
The funding is now long gone, and it has not been renewed. But the University of Plymouth team is carrying on the activites and forging collaborations with a number of partners to continue developing and promoting research in this area.
The ICCMR offers opportunities for post-graduate research in Quantum Computer Music through masters and Ph.D. programmes.
The Team
- Eduardo R. Miranda
- Bob Coecke
- Omar Costa Hamido
- Paulo V. Itaborai
- Suchitra Basak
- Scott Oshiro
- Hector Miller-Bakewell
- Peter James Thomas
- Brian N. Siegelwax
- Hari Vignesh Shaji
Repositories: Tools, Demos and Materials
quantumaudio: A Python package (beta) for Quantum Representations of Audio, encoding and decoding- The QAC Toolkit for Quantum Computing in Max and Tutorials
- TTT - Transition Table Tools (Max)
- OSC-Qasm - An OSC Python interface for executing Qasm code
- Code and resources for Quanthoven, music with QNLP experiment
- Partitioned Quantum Cellular Automata (PQCA)
- PQCA Tutorials: Getting stated and rendering music
- Generating Musical Scales
- Demonstrations of Musical Quantum Walks and the Basak-Miranda Algorithm
- Code and resources for Teaching Qubits to Sing project
Events
- 2nd International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity (2023) - Coming Soon
- Sounding Qubits: Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity - Living in a Quantum State, Goethe-Institut London (Dec 2022). Book launch (Quantum Computer Music) + performances. Documentary video here
- 1st International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity (Nov 2021). Videos of presentations now available here.
Books
- Quantum Computer Music - Foundations, Methods and Advanced Concepts. 2022(b). Springer
- Quantum Computing in the Arts and Humanities - An Introduction to Core Concepts, Theory and Applications. 2022(a). Springer.
Research Papers
- Quantum Representations of Sound: From Mechanical Waves to Quantum Circuits [arXiv:2301.01595]
- Teaching Qubits to Sing: Mission Impossible? [arXiv:2207.08225v3]
- A Quantum Natural Language Processing Approach to Musical Intelligence [arXiv:2111.06741v2]
- Quantum Computer Music: Foundations and Initial Experiments [arXiv:2110.124088]
- Quantum Computer: Hello, Music! [arXiv:2006.13849]
- OSC-Qasm: Interfacing Music Software with Quantum Computing [arXiv:2212.01615v2]
- Creative Quantum Computing: Inverse FFT, Sound Synthesis, Adaptive Sequencing and Musical Composition [arXiv:2005.05832]
- On Interfacing the Brain with Quantum Computers: An Approach to Listen to the Logic of the Mind [arXiv:2101.03887]
Music and Artistic Outputs
Other articles
- Behind The Scenes: My First Paper [Medium]
- Introducing Sharp Scale: A Series of Generative Quantum Art Pieces [Medium / Qiskit Blog]
- Presenting the 1st International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity [Medium / Qiskit Blog]
- The Arrival of Quantum Computer Music (with sound exaples) [Medium]
- I’m a Musician, and Here’s Why I’m Learning Quantum Computing [Medium]