Catherine Provenzano is an Assistant Professor of Musicology and Music Industry at UCLA. Catherine'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.

Lily Shababi is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Musicology at UCLA. She received a M.A. in Musicology from UCLA and a B.M. in Violin Performance and Music Composition from Cornish College of the Arts. Her research focuses on the relationships between voice, technology, and subjecthood that are cultivated by queer and trans musicians. Situating ethnographic methods amongst gender and technology studies, Lily demonstrates how material and practice-based approaches are essential to the research of electronic pop music. Lily has presented her work at the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society, where she received the Ingolf Dahl Award in May 2023. She is also a performer and composer of experimental electroacoustic music.