Observe and Revisit: Procedural Music Generation with Cellular Automata on Quantum Hardware

This paper presents a procedural music generation quantum computing system and respective bespoke compositional methods developed to compose “Observe” and “Revisit”, two movements of “Qubism”, a piece for chamber orchestra and electronics. The system implements a dynamical system model known as a Partitioned Quantum Cellular Automaton, or PQCA. The compositional method translates the time-based behaviour of the PQCA into musical patterns. The music was generated with a PQCA built with 96 qubits. As it is not trivial to simulate 96 qubits on an ordinary classical computer, it was far more convenient to compose the movements using quantum hardware.