ΔpΔx ≥ h/4Π

0:00

Instrumentation: Fixed Media
Duration: 7 minutes
Recording Available: Yes
Performed: Yes

...I try to stay calm and forget everything I've learned about music before this moment. I must make myself understand. This is the future.

From the speakers I hear what sounds like dripping water, though I know it's something more advanced. What is he trying to tell me? I feel like this might somehow be a critique of the complex and often arbitrary relationship between man and science and nature; I keep seeing fish and particles dancing in the realm of a massive retina. It could be about everything and nothing all at once. Strange images of fish emerge juxtaposed with various geometric shapes; soon there is water and the mood of the piece alters slightly from complete madness into something more serene and, for reasons don't understand, sexual. I am beginning to feel human again.

Lane Koivu
What's Up! Magazine


"Mike McFerron's CD piece, ΔpΔx ≥ h/4Π, resounded with continuously evolving piano samples."

Larry Austin
Computer Music Journal
Vol. 29 Issue 4

"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." -Werner Heisenberg, 1927.

Heisenberg is known today as the father of Quantum Mechanics, and especially for Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (HUP) which states that the more you know about the position of a subatomic particle, the less you know about its momentum. Conversely to some certainty, you may be able to know the momentum of a particle, but you will not be able to predict its position despite the sophistication of present or future measurement technologies.

Some may see that HUP is analogous to the perception of music. As listeners, once we analyze sound events, we take them out of time. We are aware of the sound, but not its context at a given moment. Even though Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum mechanics, most of his close friends would probably have noted his facility at the piano.

ΔpΔx ≥ h/4Πis composed using only piano samples. I created this work using Csound and DigiDesign's Pro-Tools exclusively. This composition was completed in my home studio in Lockport, Illinois, 2004. Respectfully, this work is dedicated to my colleague Dr. Leonard Weisenthal: educator, physicist, and listener.