I missed the opportunity to write newsletters for the month of September and October. NGL, life has been hard to cope with: I'm still trying to find my way in Coimbra, I have a very sick parent, and another full-blown war has started!? There are some good things too: the subscriber list of this newsletter has grown, I was able to travel to Berlin with my better half, and... well, you're about to see if you continue to read below! I'm including news in the categories events, writing, software, and creative work, and I am still looking to receive some feedback here. As always, you can see the previous newsletters backed up here. And feel free to share this with anyone who might be interested in signing up.
WRITING
Quantum Memory of Musical Compositions
I have recently co-authored a new paper with the mathematician, composer, and artist Maria Mannone, from Italy. It is called "Quantum Memory of Musical Compositions" and it is an inquiry about finding beauty in music, as a balance between surprise and expectation. This is understood as a function of the amount of memory in music, that we compute using the evolution of a quantum state. There was some old code derived from Mannone's MSc in theoretical physics that I have now rewritten to run near realtime, in Max. This paper was presented at ISQCMC Berlin, and it is now on arxiv as well. The code for the project is also available on a github repository here.
There are very bad news about the Community.quantumland.art website that I advertised last time: I moved from vitepress into notion (because relational databases) with some additional code to publish it as a website under the same domain - but Notion HQ secretly changed their codebase and effectively brought the website offline twice! The good news is that I have just successfully ported everything back to Github as a... Digital Garden. The url stays the same, yes. This is important not only because all the content can be truly open sourceagain, but also because creating new entries is as easy as creating an empty text file in a folder. There are 5 types of database entries: events, writings, creative works, software, and people. They are all cross related with wiki links and each database page includes a graph view showing all relations. I am still working on FAQ pages to break down all the steps for getting new contributions up online on the database (essentially just a very quick intro to contributing to a repository on github), but interacting on the forum is even easier - all you need is a free Github account.
The 2nd edition of the International Symposium on Quantum Computing and Musical Creativity was a blast. It was great to see so many (new and old) faces in person, and to see the community grow visibly. Thanks to Paulo, Tim, and Julia, for helping putting this together. The preparation was very intensive, but the outcome was a very nice balance of 33 participants who delivered 15 paper presentations, 3 dedicated concert/music demo moments (program notes here), a jam session, and an open discussion panel. During the latter, it was clear that people didn't want to wait another 2 years to continue the conversation, and I briefly mentioned the community.quantumland.art which was well received (though the website was down then, because notion...). There is nowa website for ISQCMC conferences that I put online with Paulo, and where the proceedings will appear: isqcmc.github.io. I am also very thankful for having being able to share this experience with my partner and collaborator, STArt, whose drawings and paintings drew some attention during the conference. Who knows what will take part in the next symposium, or even where it will be hosted ;)
On the next November 13th I will be leading the 8th session of the "Research Methodologies and Interdisciplinarity in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences" seminar in Coimbra, Portugal. This seminar is part of the PhD in Contemporary Studies (DEC), at the University of Coimbra.
SOFTWARE
Github Sponsorships
I have been active on Github for a good while now, probably averaging around a thousand contributions per year in the last 5 years, with over 150 public repositories just on my omarcostahamido profile (including forks, yes), and more to count on quantumland-art and other organizations that I worked for. However, I have only just now successfully joined the Github sponsorships program. This is a great way to show support for open source/open access projects, though it seems that they do require sponsors to have a free Github account 🤔.
After its telematic performance at ISQCMC Berlin, the electroacoustic duo NPHz (feat OCH, and SYO), will be back to playing in person, at first concert of the Splice Festival V, on November 2nd, is Boston, MA, USA. This is a festival dedicated to music with live performance and new technologies, and this fifth edition will be hosted by the Berklee College of Music.
Bandcamp Friday is back! The next one will be on November 3rd. Bandcamp is an online record store and music community that allows musicians and small labels to directly publish their music online. Recently, I added to my collection Reiko Yamada's "interpreting quantum randomness" (2022), and "Quantum Sound" (2022) by Spencer Topel, Kyle Serniak, & Luke Burkhart. Both were mentioned at ISQCMC Berlin, and are now also added to the Community. database. If you do know of other relevant records please do let me (and the world) know about it on the Community. forum. And if you only realized now it all coming together and the different plethora of things to experience (and to share!), you're not alone: here's TJ Koh's totally honest reaction when I told him ;)
In the last couple of months I've been building some admiration for clouds. Their shapes are well known to spark imagination and amusing associations of different kinds. But a longer look will unveil smooth transformations that, combined with the shifting hues of a golden hour or sunset are like a true live abstract painting spectacle happening before your eyes. I had a very marking experience like that recently. And while it was happening, or rather, while I was absorbed in it, it was like all the other worries had been paused. I attempted to take some photos, and I will try to share it here or somewhere else, not to show my skills as a photograph, but as a simple reminder to look up, let the mind float like a cloud for a moment, and appreciate these little bits of heaven that we should all be allowed to experience.