For 75 years, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars has been supporting efforts to connect publicly engaged scholars with the public they serve. One of their most prestigious programs is the Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award, funded by the Mellon Foundation and intended to support early-career faculty whose research touches on contemporary America. The institute named 10 scholars for 2024. Among them was Catherine Provenzano, assistant professor of musicology and music industry at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.
The Mellon Emerging Faculty Leaders Award is intended for scholars of exceptional intellectual promise who maintain active engagement with their larger communities. In addition to publicly engaged scholarship, Provenzano has spent her years at UCLA actively working to improve her department’s community and culture, and helping to build the new music industry program.
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Congratulations on your award. What project will it support?
Thanks! This award will support the completion of my current book project, “Emotional Signals,” which is under contract with University of Michigan Press, and the advancement of one of my second projects on sound mediation in evangelical megachurches.
Tell me about your book manuscript.
It’s about the main software packages used for pitch correction [Auto-Tune and Melodyne], which is a post-production step in music recording, mostly done on vocals. Pitch correction software is most associated with pop music, but it spans every genre now. I try to tell people that there is no genre that doesn’t use it, including in classical recordings.
Do you have a title in mind?
The working title is “Emotional Signals: Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and the Cultural Politics of Pitch Correction.”
Emotional Signals? That’s not the first thing I think about when I think about post-production audio software.
Right! There’s a presumption about audio technologies that they are just tools and that subjective, squishy things like “emotions” exist outside of them. We think that the tools just exist and then we impose our messy human subjectivity on them.
But this isn’t the case with pitch correction software?
Well, it’s complicated. Auto-tune allows for very subtle corrections in vocals. And the way we have constructed voice, is that it is supposed to be this place where we access an authentic self, so we expect an authenticity from the performer, and to pitch correct is to get in the way of the relationship between the performer and the listener.
And what I’m arguing in this book is that the inventors of auto-tune software had this big concept of emotion right at the center of their construction of the tools from the outset. As the tools have progressed, they [the inventors] have pursued a preservationist frame of vocal emotionality that is not an afterthought, it is right at the center of the technology.
This software was developed right around the turn of the century—what were the major musical trends and genres that it influenced?
The biggest one that is probably the most conspicuous to everyone is hip hop, that’s the genre where you hear an effect of Auto-Tune the most, so you hear that kind of glitchy, step-wise motion, that sort of half-sung, half-rapped vocal utterance. So hip hop really changed, really after T-Pain, because T-Pain really blew the roof off of what it meant to be a rapper.
Meaning that he changed the sound because of his deliberate use of Auto-Tune?
Yes, and because people associate Auto-Tune sound with a kind of emotional texture when it is used as an effect, and, because there’s a cultural politics that goes along with emotionality, not everyone is on board with the way that this works. Depending on identity categories like race and gender, people are hemmed into certain expectations when it comes to sounding emotional. What I argue in the book is that, by listening to how pitch correction has evolved, we can better understand those expectations, and potentially how to subvert them. I also want people to take a way a concept of emotion that is not essentialist, but to see just how much that concept is not just constructed but also exploited.
So, there are multiple levels to the idea of emotion in music software.
Absolutely!
Let’s talk about your new research that will be supported by the Mellon Foundation. What is your new project?
I’m looking at mediated sound in evangelical megachurches.
That seems like a big leap from pop music and recording software.
It does! But it actually grew out of my first project. When I was interviewing the people who make Auto-Tune, I was talking with a customer service specialist, and he said ‘oh, of course, our biggest customer for Auto-Tune Live is the churches.’ And I was writing in my ethnographer’s notebook, I had no idea what he was talking about, so I left a little note there. Later, I was able to ask him for clarification, and he told me that the megachurches buy a ton of software and hardware.
I wouldn’t have thought that churches were such a market.
I tend to go for projects that create some sort of bridge that I don’t see yet. And I hadn’t really thought about religion when I was working on music technology. But megachurches have huge budgets, bigger budgets than most studios to buy gear. So software companies keep in mind tools that churches will buy, because these budgets exist.
So megachurches are mediating sound in similar ways as secular pop musicians!
And this gets us back to the same questions that were raised in other genres of music. But what I’m interested in here is how the people who play weekly in megachurches, and the people who run sound, think about mediation and technological tools. There are lots of interesting things to explore here about circulation and fidelity.
Provenzano’s book manuscript “Emotional Signals: Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and the Cultural Politics of Pitch Correction,” is under contract with the University of Michigan Press and tentatively scheduled for publication in 2026. Her band Kenniston will be performing around Los Angeles beginning in Fall 2024.