Teaching Qubits to Sing: Mission Impossible?

Abstract

This paper introduces QuSing, a system that learns to sing new tunes by listening to examples. QuSing extracts sequencing rules from input music and uses these rules to generate new tunes, which are sung by a vocal synthesiser. We developed a method to represent rules for musical composition as quantum circuits. We claim that such musical rules are quantum native: they are naturally encodable in the amplitudes of quantum states. To evaluate a rule to generate a subsequent event, the system builds the respective quantum circuit dynamically and measures it. After a brief discussion about the vocal synthesis methods that we have been experimenting with, the paper introduces our novel generative music method through a practical example. The paper shows some experiments and concludes with a discussion about harnessing the system’s creative potential. Accompanying materials are available in an Appendix. Audio recordings of the musical examples and programming code are available: https://github.com/iccmr-quantum/QuSing.