Catherine Provenzano’s scholarship focuses on voice, instrumentality, labor, and technology as they intersect gender, race, and class in US popular culture. She is currently writing a cultural history and ethnography of pitch correction softwares (Auto-Tune, Melodyne), and researching the political economy of sound, media, and software in megachurch worship contexts. Catherine is interested in questions and formulations of musical/sonic value, and how these affect work worlds, the environment, and social relations. In 2019, she earned her PhD in Ethnomusicology from New York University with her dissertation, “Emotional Signals: Digital Tuning Software and the Meanings of Pop Music Voices.” Using ethnographic and historical methods, she shows how the practice of pitch correction in U.S. Top 40 and hip hop puts emotion at the center of the voice’s worth.

Catherine’s work appears in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Musicology Now, and Guernica Magazine, among other outlets. She is also a singer, songwriter, and performer.