It was early in the year 2019, the musical artist Gaetano Dellepiane had the idea that quantum computers could one day forecast events in ways no previous device had done before. The following year to this conceptualization, he thought on proposing an artwork based on this process idea called “Sound of Prediction” to the international science-plus-art contest “Collide Residency Award”, hosted by “Arts at CERN“.
The original proposal included using particle tracking sensors from CERN laboratories with powerful computation to predict the outcome from experimentation. This would’ve been similar to an approach of the old concept of Maxwell daemons (originally proposed in its earliest version by Laplace).
In its published edition (ultimately crafted independently without CERN), called “Sound of Prediction, No. 1” (available on Spotify and Apple Music since early 2021), the tracking of particles were replaced with expected circuit noise inside a Noisy-Intermediate-Scale-Quantum computer. Algorithms such as Grover’s were used for initial experimentation, and to replace the original frequency pitch arbitrarily generated for this experiment using quantum audio synthesis (using an open source synthesizer that triggered quantum computing at-a-distance), a simulation of retro-causality was done replacing the original value with the last calculated element in reverse.
The final contrast between what was expected to occur in the beginning of the experiment (false supposition but with a certain amount of certainty) and its reduction through time created a modulation data-set, not exactly for conventional sonification (unlike the experimental 2016–2017 sonic crypto-currency “SoundCoin.pro” also by Gaetano Dellepiane); an audio multi-effect processor was used in this process in synchrony with the output data from the quantum computer.
The result was an original song that lasts about one and a half minutes, which took a year to finalize. With “Sound of Prediction“, a new musical genre was invented, which Gaetano liked to call “Quantum-Future”. You can listen to the published version on streaming platforms, with a remastered version now also available.
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