QuSing

Teaching Qubits to Sing

This is the repository for accompanying materials for the paper Teaching Qubits to Sing: Mission Impossible?, by Eduardo Reck Miranda and Brian N. Siegelwax.

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, which demonstrates that such rules are quantum native: they are naturally encodable in the amplitudes of quantum states. Each time the system needs to evaluate a rule to generate a subsequent event, it builds the respective quantum circuit dynamically and mesures it. After a brief discussion about the vocal synthesis methods that we have been experimenting with, the paper introduces our novel generative music method by means of a practical example. The paper shows some experiments and concludes with a discussion.

Contents:

• QuSing_Code: contains the Jupyter Notebook code, examples of input and 2 Python programs. All these need to be in the same folder. (midi2code.py and code2midi.py are just Python functions that are called in to translate MIDI data into the bespoke representation used by the system.)

• Audio_Examples_MP3: Audio renderings in MP3 format of the examples in the paper.

• Audio_Examples_WAV: Audio renderings in WAVE format of the example in the paper.

To run the code with Jupyter notebook

For running the code, you will need Python 3.8 or later.

This demonstration does not include vocal synthesis. The system reads a MIDI file to learn the rules, and generates a MIDI file with the new composition. There are many MIDI file players freely avaible. We like MuseScore, because it also shows musical notes: https://musescore.org/en

Packages and dependencies:

• qiskit: https://qiskit.org/
• pytket: https://cqcl.github.io/tket/pytket/api/
• matplotlib: https://matplotlib.org/
• numpy: https://numpy.org/
• mapomatic: https://github.com/Qiskit-Partners/mapomatic
• mthree: https://github.com/Qiskit-Partners/mthree
• mido: https://mido.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Note: It suggested to open your Jupyter notebook using the following line:

jupyter notebook --NotebookApp.iopub_data_rate_limit=10000000000