By the end of the day just another source of (quasi) random numbers which are somehow interpreted as music, isn't it?
My initial reaction was similar. Nonetheless, I'm making an effort to embrace the diversity of what music can mean to different individuals. My only question to them is: are you genuinely moved by the music itself or do you "merely" intellectualize it?
That being said, is this emerging field of Quantum Computer Music solely focused on generating random numbers? I must admit I only glanced through the article, so I wouldn't assert this definitively.
I'm a trained musician myself (see e.g. http://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1221) and I have also been exploring algorithmic composition for many years. There is no issue with diversity of what music can mean.
The issue is from my point of view, that a lot of effort is spent with different algorithmic concepts, but in the end, any area of the generated number range is arbitrarily mapped to MIDI notes. You can e.g. see that with the output of cellular automata (which are also used in the referenced book), where any random strip of the overall image is interpreted as notes. You could just as well have used a quasi-random generator. The use of cellular automata therefore brought no added value.
> is this emerging field of Quantum Computer Music solely focused on generating random numbers?
Whenever a new idea or technology became popular, a few resourceful people started making music with it. Now it's quantum computers. Over the years, many dissertations have been written that have not really brought any progress. I give transformer DNN a good chance, but good results are likely to be a few years away.
Well, the field of quantum computing is definitely important and very promising, but it has as little to do with music like the proportions in the movements of celestial bodies.
Sonification is a very useful concept, e.g. to make the blood flow audible in medical ultrasound. But this is not the same as algorithmic composition, which is the topic here.