Is anyone clever enough to understand what the implications of this might be for sound design and electronic ‘music’ more broadly? If so, please share your thoughts in the most dumbed down way possible!
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/07/24/quantum-microphone-counts-particles-sound/
It’s going to make an excellent gimmick for selling albums/gear someday
I’m pretty sure Octatrack already does quantum level phonon manipulation since 2011… Check flex setup pages, I think there’s a toggle… 
I’m gonna wait for Phonons Mk2. You will be able to control an even smaller unit of sound, they will be velocity sensitive, and have 8 outputs.
The findings are very „basic“/fundamental, far away from musical applications, like photons are not too relevant for photographers. Other findings in the future continuing on the speedness of phonons (one paragraph in the blog post) may be usable in special effects, but would probably require a large dark hall with a mixture of sound and light, and years and years of clever thought to make possible that an audience may notice anything related to the new findings.
More straight-forward „applications“: marketing slogans and lyrics.
Optimistic opinion: This is the sort of thing that could potentially bring us next level realism in spatial effects. One application would be uber high resolution game audio, where the game engine simulates real world physics in order to increase the level of immersion. Processing power to take advantage would be effing enormous though.
Realistic opinion: Digital audio is already only an approximation of a physical sound pressure wave, so the ability to increase the resolution of the actual sound wave offers zero benefit since we can’t even perfectly match what we’ve been working with. (Kinda like if a painter can’t paint to a high enough resolution to fool anyone that they’re actually looking out a window, what help is the knowledge of how photons behave?). As for my idea with using it for spatial fx, the ability to record sound at this high resolution to use as a reverb impulse and then actually process it just aint happening anytime soon; if at all.
And even if we could, those changes are so tiny that it’s unlikely that we could even perceive any kind of difference. To use another analogy, being able to work on a phonon level would offer the tiniest fractional increase in perceived benefit compared to listening to WAV over FLAC.
Going by their finding that The phonons increased the current in that “special medium”, then that medium would be an integral part to any audible application. For example: a flow of phonons would be like the electrical flow to your headphones, and this “special medium” would be the magnet/coil/diaphragms.
Well you can’t have a photo without photons 
Anyway they’re extremely relevant to us. Or rather, their behaviour is. The diffraction limit of sensors is entirely based on properties of photons. It’s why a larger pixel pitch and an overall larger sensor size will give higher resolution than the sensor in a mobile phone that has a higher pixel count.
My first thought as an application was the voicing weapons in the novel/movie, Dune.
Of course, James. Photons are just on a too granular level for photographers to need to care about, that‘s what I meant.
There may be exceptions, like the tension between straightness and wave behavior (only vague knowledge on my side), which can probably somehow be captured in photos.
For an excellent deep dive into the musical history and use and future of very small sounds, including phonons, see Microsound by Curtis Roads: