Sounding Qubits

FILE 2024 | Quantico
International Electronic Language Festival
Eduardo Reck Miranda – Sounding Qubits – Brazil

Although he has learned classical musical instruments since childhood, Eduardo Miranda’s favorite tool for composing is the computer. The researcher has been delving into artificial intelligence and innovative computing methods for compositing for some time, as they offer fresh insights and ideas beyond his own.

A quantum computer deals with information encoded as qubits. A qubit is to a quantum computer what a bit is to a digital one: a basic unit of information. In hardware, qubits exist in the subatomic world. They are subject to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Quantum computers are like super-powered versions of classical digital computers. While a digital computer processes data in a linear, step-by-step fashion, a quantum computer can explore many possibilities at once.

Operating a quantum computer requires different ways of thinking about encoding and processing information. This is where composers can benefit greatly. This technology is destined to facilitate the development of unprecedented ways of creating music.

Bio

Composer who works at the intersection of music, science and new technologies. His background as an artificial intelligence scientist and classical composer with early involvement in avant-garde pop music informs his distinctive music. He has composed for BBC Radio 3, BBC Concert Orchestra, BBC Singers and Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He is a professor at the University of Plymouth and a research associate at Quantinuum, where he explores music composition with quantum computers.

The Heart Chamber Orchestra
File Festival – Hipersonica 

In the TERMINALBEACH Heart Chamber Orchestra (made up of artists Erich Berger and Peter Vatava), twelve musicians played pieces from the heartbeat, recorded by an electrocardiogram from data sent by sensors placed on their bodies. As the live score created in real time from the physical and emotional states of the musicians, their beats further influenced the resulting musical composition. In this way, the biological feedback loop becomes a self-generating, organic and evolving system, which creates a musical score and a show that adopts the form of open or network art, in which chance and interdependence, thus how emotional changes and computational reasoning create a biological and psychological dynamic at the same time.

Supermassive Black Holes
Supermassive Black Holes is an acoustic ceiling installation for the main lobby of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. The design is part of a series of projects in which we work with small primitives that are aggregated into a larger whole. In this case, there are over 10,000 felt cones stitched together into three gigantic, 20’ tall, hanging felt vortexes that that absorb sound through its materiality and geometry. The thousands of cone shape parts trap and disperse sound waves while softening the overall acoustic quality of the space.

ECHO CHAMBER
Performance audiovisuelle en plusieurs tableaux, Echo Chamber s’inspire des technologies qui permettent de sonder l’intérieur du corps, telles que les ultrasons et l’acupuncture, générant une composition sonore dans laquelle l’idée de résonance prédomine. En créant une interface modulaire à trois panneaux permettant de multiples manipulations, Messier a défini les limites des possibilités d’exécution d’une chorégraphie son et lumière. Saisissez de longues aiguilles comme s’il s’agissait de notes d’un instrument, perçant une plaque sensible à l’audio qui déclenche des séquences sonores.

ECHO CHAMBER
Performance audiovisiva in più tableau, Echo Chamber si ispira a tecnologie che ci permettono di sondare all’interno del corpo, come gli ultrasuoni e l’agopuntura, generando una composizione sonora in cui predomina l’idea di risonanza. Nel creare un’interfaccia modulare di tre pannelli che consente molteplici manipolazioni, Messier ha determinato i confini delle possibilità per l’esecuzione di una coreografia di suoni e luci. Impugna lunghi aghi come se fossero note di uno strumento, perforando una piastra audio-reattiva che innesca sequenze sonore.

Labor
What does labor smell like? Labor is a dynamic, self-regulating art installation that re-creates the scent of people exerting themselves under stressful conditions. There are, however, no people involved in making the smell – it is created by bacteria propagating in the three glass bioreactors. Each bioreactor incubates a unique species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies: Staphylococcus epidermidis, Corynebacterium xerosis and Propionibacterium avidum. As these bacteria metabolize simple sugars and fats, they create the distinct smells associated with human exertion, stress and anxiety. Their scents combine in the central chamber with which a sweatshop icon, the white t-shirt, is infused as the scents are disseminated. The scent intensifies throughout the exhibition.

The mask of youth
The eyes of the latest portrait of Queen Elizabeth I follow you around the room. No, they really do. Mat Collishaw’s hyperrealistic mask of the Tudor queen comes to life, whirring and grimacing, to shock visitors in the shadowy former royal chambers of the Queen’s House. As the days darken, the effect will get spookier. The Virgin Queen’s dark eyes dart around nervously. Her mouth opens as if to speak but she cannot find the words. She is dazed by a future she can’t comprehend, a robot ghost staring in horror and doubt at her own painted image – Collishaw’s undead death mask has her eyes fixed on the Armada Portrait, painted in 1588 and a treasure of the Queen’s House after being meticulously restored.

Your double my double our ghost
The installation acts a space for the consideration of intimacy and meditation– both alone and with others that may share the space – through the merging of the viewer’s own reflections articulated through a composition of shifting light and emerging sounds which fill an otherwise dark chamber. Functioning similarly to the classic funfair mirror– the flexible silver two-way mirror sheeting forming an ethereal hanging centrepiece– the work invites the viewer to consider representations of themselves which appear distorted and transient, and which merge with those around them to form ‘new presences’. In this sense the viewer may see themselves multiplied or doubled with another viewer, or find themselves alone in a rare moment of literal reflection providing a contemplative space or eliciting a hallucinatory fantasy bringing forth ideas in neuroscience around the Self and Other.

Oresteia Opera

Scored for soloists, mixed chorus, children’s chorus and chamber ensemble, Iannis Xenakis’ music for Oresteia has been cited as “ruggedly dissonant” since its 1987 première in Sicily. A wooden-planked stage is empty save three platforms, one each for the chamber players and percussion, another for a drummer on a separate perch. On a high screen to start, a loop video shows an almost-naked woman stretched out face down in a bathtub who is being hosed down uninterruptedly with water. No forewarning, and the clip changes to a thick forest, a small girl being physically abused by an adult man. While the same video images reappear at the end of the opera, but it’s nebulous soft-edged shapes –mood landscapes as it were – that are the usual backdrop for the 90-minute piece.

Brume
In the collaborative work Brume fog emerges from and self-organizes on the surface on a sculptural element, congealing with light into an elusive stratum. The installation utilizes a series of ultrasonic transducers that generate thick clouds of dense, yet extremely lightweight water vapor. Fog is produced in an inner chamber contained within an enclosure that is outfitted with a porous surface. A small radial blower inside the apparatus gently pumps air into the inner chamber lifting the fog through the membrane, whereby it “settles” on the surface. Viewed from a distance, the fog appears as a visualized mass of air circumscribing the perimeter of the enclosure.

THE LONG NOW
A soap bubble usually remains stable for only a few moments – it is a perfectly formed sphere with an iridescent surface that reflects its surroundings. As one of the classical vanitas symbols the soap bubble traditionally stands for the transience of the moment and the fragility of life. THE LONG NOW approaches the soap bubble from a contemporary perspective – with reference to its chemical and physical properties as well as recent scientific and technological developments. THE LONG NOW is aimed at extending the lifespan of a soap bubble, or even to preserve it forever. Using an improved formula, a machine generates a bubble, sends it to a chamber with a controlled atmosphere and keeps it there in suspension for as long as possible. The project is presented in the form of an experimental set-up in which the newly created soap bubble oscillates permanently between fragility and stability.

Aquaphoneia
Aquaphoneia is an alchemical installation centred around the poiesis of time and transmutation of voice into matter. A large horn floating mid space echoes the ghosts of Edison, Bell, and Berliner’s machines. But unlike early recording, herding sound energy to etch pressure patterns in solid matter, this odd assemblage transmutes voice into water and water into air. Disembodied voices abandon their sources to cross the event horizon of the horn. Estranged, the schizo-phone falls into the narrow depths of the bell, squeezed into spatiotemporal infinity, calcinated, liquified and released: The aqueous voice then flows into three alchemical chambers where inner time is surrendered to the tempi of matter: unbound, yet lucid and sound.

The Smog Project
Dubai-based architecture firm Znera Space have released “The Smog Project,” a design to clean the air in Delhi, one of the world’s most polluted cities. Shortlisted in the World Architecture Festival’s Experimental Project Category, the Smog Project hopes to address Delhi’s noxious air quality by adding a network of smog filtering towers throughout the entire city. India’s capital has become known for toxic smog levels from overcrowding and industrial waste. Znera’s proposal hopes to cleanse the smog chamber and generate smog free air.

chromo sapiens
Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir / Shoplifter has transformed a warehouse in Giudecca into a multi-sensory, cavernous environment with a cacophonous amount of her signature material, synthetic hair. Color, sound and irresistible textures guide visitors through three distinct chambers provoking an immersive experience of visual and auditory stimuli.

جيمس توريل
詹姆斯·特瑞尔
ג’יימס טורל
ジェームズ·タレル
설치작품 제임스 터렐
Джеймса Таррелла
Bindu Shards
Bindu Shards is a “fully immersive visual and auditory work to be experienced by one person at a time.” One is strapped down and sealed in for 15 minutes in this white chamber and exposed to monotone sound and color.

Bowed Piano
Few chamber groups deploy their musicians as oddly as the Bowed Piano Ensemble. The 10 players, students led by the composer Stephen Scott, stand around, and sometimes under, a concert grand, armed with items of all kinds — nylon fishing line, piano hammers, guitar picks, strips of paper, rolls of plumber’s tape — and reach into the instrument to draw sounds from its strings.

Post Silentium
Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra
Jens Goerg Bachmann

24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41
Performed by Hyeri Choi

Ludwig’s Nightmare
Performed by Yael Weiss

Born in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on the border of Siberia, Russian-American composer,
concert pianist, poet and visual artist Lera Auerbach has become one of today’s most sought
after and exciting creative voices. She has published more than 100 works for orchestra, opera
and ballet, as well as choral and chamber music.

الكسندر بونوماريف
АЛЕКСАНДР ПОНОМАРЕВ
A PARALLEL VERTICAL

Chapel Saint Louis, de la Salpetriere, Paris
Installation
Periscope installation with a cable suspension system. Metal, plastic, video optic system, acrylic spheres, sound wave generators.
The keystone artistic project of the Paris Fesitval d’Automne will be realized in September 2007, at the Salpetriere chapel in the center of Paris. A 36-meter periscope hanging from the dome forms a rigid vertical, equipped in the lower part with the head of the periscope with an ocular allows any viewer to look at the Parisian horizon, expanding vision in the spectacular spaces of the cathedral. The real-time video image is broadcast on closed-circuit television to chambers, offices and other buildings attached to the chapel of Salpetriere hospital. The patients, doctors and staff have the opportunity to take in the unexpected view point of the random viewer and peek past the horizon. This project has been organized by the French Ministry of Culture and the Energy of Art Foundation, Moscow

Camera Lucida: Sonochemical Observatory
Camera Lucida (chamber of light or lucidity) directly transforms sound waves into light emissions by means of a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. After adapting to the darkness surrounding the installation, one gradually perceives the detailed configurations of glowing sound fields.