Does the Universe Play Dice? The Question of Determinism vs. Indeterminism in the Examination of Aleatory Music

Overview

Objectives/Goals My goal was to deduce whether or not a selection of aleatory music really was random. I questioned if the composers, and perhaps the human mind, can truly operate on an indeterminate level. Methods/Materials I used two compilations of sheet music by John Cage: John Cage Piano Works 1935-48 and John Cage Prepared Piano Music - Volume 2 1940-47. After selecting 10 pieces within these books, I counted the distribution of notes in each. I used these figures to tell how close the occurences of each note were to yielding 1/12 of the whole. If each note appeared 1/12 of the time, I would assume that the pieces weren't biased in note selection and, thus, were random. Results The chi-square test for goodness of fit proved there was a 0% chance that my results followed the 1/12 ratios. Conclusions/Discussion The aleatory (or indeterminate) music was, in fact, caused (or determinate) because it held biases in notes. This could mean that the human mind cannot operate randomly, determinism may be quite applicable to our lives, or Einstein was correct when he stated, "God does not play dice."

Competition history

• CSEF 2003 Mathematics & Software · Entry S1208

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Computational Sciences projects
• CSEF Computational Sciences projects
• Every CSEF 2003 project