Quantum Composition and Improvisation
Dale E. Parson · AAAI Publications (The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)) · 2012
Quantum mechanical systems exist as superpositions of complementary states that collapse to classical, concrete states upon becoming entangled with the measurement apparatus of observer-participants. A musical composition its performance constitute a quantum system. and Historically, conventional musical notation has presented the appearance of a composition as a deterministic, concrete entity, with interpretation approached as an extrinsic act. This historical perspective inhabits a subspace of the available quantum space. A quantum musical system unifies the composition, instruments, situated performance and perception as a superposition of musical events that collapses to concrete musical events via the interactions and perceptions of performers and audience. A composer captures superposed musical events via implicit or explicit conditional event probabilities, and human and/or machine performers create music by collapsing interrelated probabilities to zeros and ones via observer-participancy.