Sean William Calhoun | Composer and pianist

Centuries of scientific progress led toward increasing determinism — results could be predicted accurately given sufficient understanding of the physical laws at play and the starting conditions. But a little over a century ago, physicists began finding instances at very small scales where outcomes were inherently indeterministic — the distribution of probabilities of physical events could be known, but within those, the outcome would be fundamentally random. This received resistance, including from Einstein, who famously said (what is often translated as) “God does not play dice with the universe” — asserting that the universe was still deterministic, but some yet-unknown variables would explain away the seeming indeterminism.
But over time, hidden-variable theories have repeatedly been disproven, and current evidence supports that, at a quantum scale, metaphorical dice are being played with the universe. And so Playing Dice with the Universe is about various parts of quantum physics and its indeterminacy, and the electronics are all derived from recordings of shaking, rolling, and dropping dice.
Due to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, position and momentum cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. At a macro scale, you can know where a train is, and how fast it’s going. But at a quantum scale, determining a particle’s position past a certain precision necessarily makes your measurement of its momentum less precise, and vice-versa. And so, in Uncertainty, the ensemble’s momentum through the harmonic progression is fixed — they will spend a certain time on each chord, then move on — but the position of their notes is variable, not locked into a meter.
While electrons in an atom have different possible energy states, those states are not continuous, but quantized. And so in Quantization, the players’ rhythms are quantized to a rhythmic grid, and they flip between low and high energy states. Each member of the ensemble plays on a rhythmic cycle of a different length, and when they move to a high-energy state, they play higher and twice as fast. Initially, all of the players switch together, but later, their energy states are not always synchronized.
Due to wave-particle duality and the resulting uncertainty, a particle won’t have a precise trajectory, but rather a wavefunction of possible paths, interfering with each other to make a probability distribution of possible outcomes. But until a measurement is carried out and the electron’s wavefunction collapses into a particular outcome, the particle (wave) is in a state of superposition — having probabilities of a range of positions simultaneously. And so in Superposition, the electric guitar plays a melody representing the most probable range of outcomes, while the flute and clarinet play alternate versions around it, representing less probable ranges.
Particles can be entangled such that, until they are interfered with, their states will correlate. This means that, if you know the particles’ correlation and you observe one, you can know the state of the other, however far away it is. And so in Entanglement, eight times a d8 (octahedral die) is rolled and its result called out, and all the members of the ensemble are entangled with that die, so they play the music corresponding to that number.
When you make helium-4 very cold (or helium-3 even colder), it becomes a superfluid. This puts all of the helium atoms in the same quantum state, giving them zero viscosity, so they can flow through very tiny gaps, spin in vortices indefinitely, and can siphon themselves over the edge of a container to flow down. So in Superfluidity, most of the instruments repeatedly flow down and then swirl in vortices of notes while the bass plays a long melody.
Playing Dice with the Universe was composed for the ensemble fivebyfive.