Teleportation is most commonly the stuff of science fiction and, for
many, would conjure up the immortal phrase “Beam me up Scotty”.
However, a new study has described how its status in science fact could actually be employed as another, and perhaps unlikely, form of entertainment – live music.
Dr Alexis Kirke, Senior Research Fellow in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at the University of Plymouth (UK), has for the first time shown that a human musician can communicate directly with a quantum computer via teleportation.
The result is a high-tech jamming session, through which a blend of live human and computer-generated sounds come together to create a unique performance piece.
Speaking about the study, published in the current issue of the Journal of New Music Research,
Dr Kirke said: “The world is racing to build the first practical and
powerful quantum computers, and whoever succeeds first will have a
scientific and military advantage because of the extreme computing power
of these machines. This research shows for the first time that this
much-vaunted advantage can also be helpful in the world of making and
performing music. No other work has shown this previously in the arts,
and it demonstrates that quantum power is something everyone can
appreciate and enjoy.”
Quantum teleportation is the ability to
instantaneously transmit quantum information over vast distances, with
scientists having previously used it to send information from Earth to
an orbiting satellite over 870 miles away.
In the current study,
Dr Kirke describes how he used a system called MIq (Multi-Agent
Interactive qgMuse), in which an IBM quantum computer executes a
methodology called Grover’s Algorithm.
Discovered by Lov Grover at
Bell Labs in 1996, it was the second main quantum algorithm (after
Shor’s algorithm) and gave a huge advantage over traditional computing.
In
this instance, it allows the dynamic solving of musical logical rules
which, for example, could prevent dissonance or keep to ¾ instead of
common time.
It is significantly faster than any classical
computer algorithm, and Dr Kirke said that speed was essential because
there is actually no way to transmit quantum information other than
through teleportation.
The result was that when played the theme
from Game of Thrones on the piano, the computer – a 14-qubit machine
housed at IBM in Melbourne – rapidly generated accompanying music that
was transmitted back in response.
Dr Kirke, who in 2016 staged the
first ever duet between a live singer and a quantum supercomputer,
said: “At the moment there are limits to how complex a real-time
computer jamming system can be. The number of musical rules that a human
improviser knows intuitively would simply take a computer too long to
solve to real-time music. Shortcuts have been invented to speed up this
process in rule-based AI music, but using the quantum computer speed-up
has not be tried before. So while teleportation cannot move information
faster than the speed of light, if remote collaborators want to connect
up their quantum computers – which they are using to increase the speed
of their musical AIs – it is 100% necessary. Quantum information simply
cannot be transmitted using normal digital transmission systems.”
