Achievement Unlocked
At the end of my first book, “Dungeons & Qubits: an Adventurer’s Tale Beyond the Quantum Computing Tutorials,” is a section titled, “Wish List.” In this section, I listed six projects that I was hoping to work on in the near future. The first topic on my wish list was “music.”
The first part of the story is actually quite simple. At some point before writing my book, or at least at some point before I finished writing my book, I discovered a paper about generating music with quantum computers.
Music.
Can you believe it? I couldn’t believe it. Of all the things we struggle to do with quantum computers, someone figured out how to synthesize music with them. Honestly, without stumbling upon that groundbreaking paper, that never would have occurred to me.
So, who cares?
Well, here’s why you should care.
I could imagine using a quantum computer to generate noise. After all, NISQ devices excel at making noise. But, how do you generate music that actually sounds good? That now begins to sound like artificial intelligence (AI), but using quantum computers. And if we can somehow teach qubits to play good music, what other forms of human cognition can we model?
Mind = blown.
Anyway, as you might be able to tell by now, I found the concept thoroughly fascinating. Unfortunately, there was one really big problem with adding quantum music to my wish list: I have absolutely zero musical ability.
That’s not necessarily a problem, though, because most of my projects these days are collaborations. I start almost every project with a learning curve, anyway, so, in my mind, all I needed was someone with some musical ability to collaborate with. I was sure we could figure it out.
But, that raised a different problem. Where was I going to find someone with musical ability who would be willing to collaborate on a quantum music project?
