Quantum Computers Don’t Make Sense. But This One Makes Music
On Friday evening, inside a small castle on the southwest coast of England, a Welsh mezzo-soprano performed a duet with a quantum computer.
The quantum computer wasn’t actually there. It was 5,300 miles away in a lab on the outskirts of Los Angeles. But this is the modern age. We don’t just have quantum computers. They can perform over the Internet.
The performance was orchestrated by Alexis Kirke, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research at England’s Plymouth University. His credits include several other duets of the modern age, most notably a violinist playing alongside the ionizing radiation of a cloud chamber and a flautist accompanying an Apple iPad as it made music from palinopsia. But Friday’s duet was something different.
