'Quantum Beat' for Live Electronics
WONWOORI
For composer WONWOORI, computer music is a medium for understanding the world around us and humans. When he explores the microscopic world of human brain waves and cochlear implant users' sound recognition, he first goes through the process of applying sinusoidal waves to data as a basis for sound synthesis. He was inspired to compose while looking at the human world that we are unaware of through the sine wave, which is the smallest component of sound, and suddenly thinks about the Quantum, the smallest component that makes up our world.
Quantum physics is different from the world of physics that we have learned empirically. Surprisingly, the world of atoms replaced by sound is empirically familiar in its characteristics. According to the Bose-Einstein condensates, in the coolest state in the universe, atoms generate extremely slow waves, precisely within the range of human hearing. And the assembly of those atoms coincided with the properties of additive synthesis (such as the rumbling of beats). Even being able to be the same attracted the composer's curiosity very much.
This work, 'Quantum Beat', is composer Wonwoo Lee's first attempt to view our world through the auditory picture of quantum. He teamed up with Kim Chae-won, a quantum computer researcher at Seoul National University, and Park Jong-hwa, a research scientist. Among the numerous quantum physics theories and hypotheses, we found musical potential in Richard Feynman's theory of sum of paths.
Based on this theory, we recorded the path of an atom passing through a single slit as a probability by integrating it, and added it to the sound material. As a feature of the composition of motivation, when measuring particles, after measuring the starting point and the arrival point, a hypothesis about the process can be established.
The flow through the entire song was left to the FFT characteristics of the quantum computer. The general computer we usually use when performing FFT analyzes the phase and magnitude very accurately, but quantum computers approach the FFT with a probability of about 10 qubits. And the result of FFT is known in the form of cumulative values and histograms. Analysis of two cycles of cosine waves as 4096 samples through a quantum computer showed unexpected results. From the sound of a sine wave quantum FFT that gradually turns into noise, we can audibly imagine the existence of protons surrounding us.
[Credit] Research with, Chaewon Kim, Researcher of Quantum Computing, Seoul National University Jong-Hwa Park, Researcher of Electrical Information, Seoul National University