I Was Underwhelmed By This Song That Was Created By A Quantum Computer

There is so much controversy and pushback on AI-generated music that there’s no point revisiting that argument again. But would things be any different if generative artificial intelligence was combined with quantum computing? Could a state-of-the-art quantum computer actually improve the music creation process? I’ll let you be the judge when you watch and listen to the video below, but for me it was . . . “interesting” (the phrase you hear from music execs when they don’t want to tell you the truth).

The Back Story

Electro artist ILĀ  teamed up with British startup Moth to create a new track called Recurse that they call “a quantum leap in music creation.”

The track was composed using Moth’s custom software platform Archaeo running on a quantum computer from the company called IQM (click the link if you want to buy one – bring lots of money and a couple of PhDs).

One of the big differences in this creation is that the AI model was trained strictly on content created by ILĀ, as opposed to every music source on the internet, so it’s clean in terms of ethics and copyright.

The Quantum Track

After checking out the quantum track, I listened to some of ILĀ’s other music and it’s very cinematic. Recurse is nothing like it.

It almost seems like a bunch of samples were randomly arranged in a workstation and it was called a track, or a sample and hold generator triggering samples. Hooray for experimentation, but I’m not buying the quantum leap part except for the pun involved.

Quantum computers are still experimental, and while I can see the potential value in chemistry, medical, life sciences, and automotive, it seems like overkill for music. I do appreciate the fact that someone is willing to take a chance on trying something new though. There’s nothing like pushing the envelope.

That said, if this is something that you dig, you might also want to check out Recurse [Infinite Mix] which is a version generated in real time and continuously looping with no ending.