Item — HN Reader

> random numbers which are somehow interpreted as music

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.

1 comments

> I'm making an effort to embrace the diversity of what music can mean to different individuals...

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.