School of Performing Arts

What happens when you take archaeological artifacts out of the lab or the museum, and use them to inspire a storytelling performance? How might artifacts inspire theater, and how might theater animate artifacts? Here, in a dialogue between a writer/performer and an anthropologist, we explore these questions, using a recent solo performance piece to think about the possibilities of theater inspired by an “archaeological imagination.”

This paper curates two collections of externals originally created for both Max/MSP and Pure Data (Pd) at a time before the coding protocols of the two programs started to significantly and increasingly diverge. The current distributions of these two packages for Pd were created to finally separate the Max/MSP code from the Pd code. We will focus on some of the functionalities of this software that are not easily obtained by combining other Pd objects. Some of the more recent tools are especially suited for spatial composition, through arbitrary panning schemes, or by spectrally fractionating an incoming sound, for spectral diffusion to multiple loudspeakers. Several different spectral processors are also introduced.

Traditional software synthesis systems, such as Music V, use an instance model of computation in which each note instantiates a new copy of an instrument. An alternative is the resource model, exemplified by MIDI " mono mode, " in which multiple updates can modify a sound continuously, and where multiple notes share a single instrument. We have developed a unified, general model for describing combinations of instances and resources. Our model is a hierarchy in which resource-instances at one level generate output, which is combined to form updates to the next level. The model can express complex system configurations in a natural way.

This colloquy may be the first multi-perspective, in-depth look at a music video. We can imagine why there’s been such a paucity of music-video scholarship. It’s not only due to, as Ann Kaplan has observed, that music videos straddle a border between advertising and art, but that the analyst must also feel comfortable with addressing the music, the image (including the moving bodies, cinematography and editing), the lyrics, and the relation among them. (This might include looking at a dance gesture against a harmonic shift and an edit, and asking how these might relate to one another.) A collective approach is probably the best way to understand a clip and the genre, and also adds some benefits. Music videos are open forms, and as each analyst charts his or her path through the video, we can get a sense of a personal perspective (and readers can then more carefully track their own trajectories as well).

Each of us takes on a different facet: Dani Oore writes on the song’s rhythm arrangement, Eric Lyon attends to rhythm and the song’s production features, Gabriel Ellis attends to the song’s multiply-stylized vocal performances, Maeve Sterbenz considers harmony and gesture; Gabrielle Lochard looks closely at race and the background figures; Dale Chapman attends to “APESH**T” in relation to other African American, opulent, art-inspired videos as well as their bonds to neoliberalism; Jason King considers larger contemporary phenomena, including other films, that turn to the museum as a historical repository that might help us solve what feels like humanity under threat; Kyra Gaunt describes how The Carters confront exclusionary regimes of power and other “ape-shit” through a mosaic of art, music, and media; and I offer an overview of music-video aesthetics, and some possible ways of finding a path through the video.

We hope our tack will inspire a confederated approach, where art historians, dance scholars, media experts, and those who work on poetry and rap lyrics, costuming and architecture would write alongside us.