If the sounds of Quantum Violin enacted by Mia Zabelka and Glen Hall are remarkable — dense miasma from which undulate denser waves and through which eventually pulses a vibrant heart — so too are the means by which they were accomplished:
Quantum Violin has a sub-structure formed by sounds generated by a Quantum Oscillator that are audible throughout the piece. It was programmed with 8 different sets of parameters, giving the ‘drone’ a slowly varying texture. This sub-structure was created to signify physical reality’s undergirding in the quantum realm, a constant vibrational ‘hum’. Two tracks of Mia Zabelka’s violin were given 3 ‘treatments’ within this sonic landscape. Two treatments were done by IRCAM’s artificial intelligence software, OMax, which segmented and recombined the violin’s performances to coincide with movements in the video, which forms the visual aspect of the quantum world: geometric and vibrating. The third treatment was to atomise the violin’s sound into the microsound sphere using IRCAM’s CataRT, that segmented it into sonic ‘quanta’, tiny grains 0.071 milliseconds, to produce minute clicks, representing the smallest sonic events possible, while still remaining audible. Mia Zabelka’s violin exists as the centre of a quantum sound galaxy.