The Performance Studies Working Group hosted an event called “Histories and Futures of the Metaverse with Michael Veal” on October 31.
Hannah Kotler
Collaborating journalist
Yale News
The Performance Studies Working Group hosted a sequel to the Fall 2022 series on “Stories and Futures of the Metaverse with Michael Veal” – the first in-person PSWG event since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Veal — the Henry L. and Luce G. Moses Professor of Music, African-American Studies and American Studies — specializes in ethnomusicology, or the study of music from different cultures. His Oct. 31 talk centered on his most recent book, “Wait Until Tomorrow: The Music of John Coltrane and Miles Davis Re-Assessed in the Digital Age,” which is slated for release in 2023..
Jhe PSWG is a space where scholars and artists share their work with Yale’s interdisciplinary students and faculty. The PSWG is part of the Performance Studies Initiative at Yale. Each year the PSWG focuses on a different theme. Commissioner Andie Berry and Tavia Nyong’o, the PSWG faculty organizer this semester, has chosen the theme of “metaverse” for the fall 2022 series.
“We were inspired to investigate this theme due to Mark Zuckerberg’s rebranding of Facebook as Meta, a ‘social metaverse company,'” Berry said. “[Taking] the huge advancements in virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, and a new widespread interest in digital and virtual possibilities as a legacy of the pandemic lockdowns…as inspiration points, we wanted to spend some time thinking about how whose technology is changing performance and how it is already enmeshed in performance.
Veal, who jokingly called his work “a work of music, history, music theory, disguised as a work of science fiction”, began his speech with two examples of distortion.
First, it discusses the free meter music of John Coltrane as a deviation from traditional jazz. Second, he introduced the Miles Davis Quintet in the late 1960s, known as the “Lost Quintet” because they never produced an official studio recording. As a result, all existing recordings are unofficial tapes with low fidelity sound quality. Veal played excerpts from the unofficial recordings of John Coltrane and Charlie Parker as examples of the distorted sound.
In order to understand and analyze this disfigured music, whether due to low fidelity sound or free meter, Veal professes the need for a new language. Veal explained that there are two ways to create this new artistic language: from within and from without.
“In other words, you can work within the established rules of that particular art practice,” Veal explained. “Or, you can go out and borrow the rules of a different artistic medium and musical work, according to the rules of literature, or poetry, or painting, or sculpture, or cinema, etc. .”
To illustrate the application of other mediums to music, Veal presented various examples of deconstructive architecture from well-known postmodern architects such as Richard Roth and Pietro Belluschi The public observed the transformation of a modernist, rectangular, rule-based architecture into an experimental architecture intentionally “infused with a sense of transformation or movement”.
To relate the discussion of music to modern technology, Veal points out that the rise of music technology in the 1960s, from filters and equalizers to multitrack recorders, was a direct result of military technology.
Additionally, modern technology – namely the Internet – is increasing the accessibility of VHS tapes and archival recordings previously inaccessible to the average researcher and has enabled the rediscovery of vernacular forms of film and photography.
“There are archives that we can access that only exist online, things that we would never have had access to in the analog world,” Veal said. “The Internet, the metaverse, becomes an archive of materials. Access to an abundance of new material in turn provides new interpretations and analyses.
The discovery of the Miles Davis Quintet recordings prompted Veal to interpret music from the late 1960s as “the way musicians use musical sound to evoke this new reality of humans being able to escape gravity” in reaction. to the concurrent space age, especially the Apollo 11. moon landing.
“It’s always interesting when you have people looking at the intersection from seemingly different areas,” said Gabriel Marous ’26, who attended the event. “I don’t know if I necessarily agree with all the points or the logic, but the idea that bringing together seemingly different things like jazz and photography can be productive is helpful in generating any art , and of my own art.”
After his talk, when asked if technology has popularized certain types of shoddy music, Veal replied that different types of music simply play different roles in society and launched into a discussion endorsing deconstruction of an elitist vision of art.
“Art can be created in people’s basements,” Veal said, “It can be created anywhere, you know. It’s just a matter of how we flip the switch of perception , to engage ourselves in it as art… art is only a springboard for an aesthetic experience of the whole world.
The PSWG will hold its next conference on November 14 in the Humanities Quadrangle Room 136.