The Hon. Christopher Schacht, in his role at the time as Chair of SOUNDSTREAM New Music in Adelaide, was the initial commissioner of VAST, a new work directly inspired by the Nobel Prize–winning discovery by Adam Riess, Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt that distant Type Ia supernovae reveal a universe not only expanding but accelerating under the influence of dark energy.

In VAST, the musical material is shaped by key ideas from contemporary cosmology, including the use of Type Ia supernovae as standard candles, the inference of an accelerating Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker universe, and the notion of dark energy as a component with negative pressure and an equation of state parameter close to minus one.

The live ensemble is treated as a dynamic model of the cosmos: small motifs erupt and decay like supernova events whose “afterglow” encodes the geometry of space–time, while long, sustained sonorities function as an audible analogue of a nearly constant dark energy background, against which all structure evolves.

A bespoke spatial audio system transforms the Georgian Theatre Royal into a 360° sound universe. More than 120 voices and 80 instrumentalists are reimagined as sonic “particles” that swirl, collide and disperse around you, echoing the behaviour of matter and energy across cosmic scales, so that, much like in space, no two seats experience the same journey.

Textures gradually stretch and thin, as if the musical space itself were obeying a repulsive pressure term in the cosmological equations, mirroring how a negative pressure component drives space apart on the largest scales. Rather than attempting to teach mathematics, VAST invites listeners to inhabit the emotional reality of Schmidt’s result that most of the universe’s energy budget resides in an invisible but decisive component, transforming the story of accelerating expansion into an immersive, time based experience of awe, uncertainty and wonder.

Three years in the making.