A Mystical Musical Adventure Ep 04 - The Quantum Melody

Deep In Sessions

**The quantum melody**
Lucía was a composer of atonal music, a music that broke with the rules of traditional harmony and explored new forms of sound expression. She liked to experiment with unusual, dissonant and random sounds, seeking to create intense and disconcerting emotions in her listeners.
One day, she received an invitation to participate in a very special project: a quantum physics laboratory offered her the opportunity to compose a musical piece based on the data of an experiment on the particle-wave duality of light. It was a phenomenon that showed that light could behave both as a wave and as a particle, depending on how it was observed.
Lucía accepted the challenge with enthusiasm. She found it fascinating to translate the mysteries of the subatomic world into music, where the laws of nature were so different from those of the macroscopic world. She thought that atonal music was perfect to reflect that paradoxical and surprising reality.
The experiment consisted of passing a beam of light through a slit and observing how it projected onto a screen. If the passage of light through the slit was not measured, an interference pattern typical of waves was formed. But if a detector was placed in the slit, the pattern changed and two bright stripes were seen, as if the light were a set of particles.
Lucía decided to use two different instruments to represent the two behaviors of light: a violin for the wave and a piano for the particle. Thus, she created a melody that alternated between both sounds, depending on whether the detector was activated or not. The result was an irregular and changing musical piece, that defied the expectations of the listener.
Lucía was very satisfied with her work. But what she did not know was that her music had an unexpected effect: when listening to it, the detector became sensitive to sound vibrations and altered the experiment. Thus, music influenced quantum reality and created a new form of observation.
When the physicists realized what was happening, they were amazed. They decided to invite Lucía to see the experiment live and play her music live. Lucía accepted delightedly. She thought it would be a unique and unrepeatable experience.
And so it was. As she played her violin and piano in front of the beam of light, Lucía felt a deep connection with the universe. It was as if her music was able to dialogue with the most elemental matter and reveal its most hidden secrets. Lucía felt part of a cosmic symphony, where everything was possible and nothing was determined.