[10/15 at 4pm] Catherine Provenzano - “Expensive-Sounding Sounds:” Interrogating Creativity in Economies of Musical Production
2 views
Skip to first unread message
Devina Martinez
Sep 24, 2025, 3:29:33 PMSep 24
to THEATER ARTS NOTES, AGPM Announce
Creative Technologies & Porter College present a guest lecture by Catherine Provenzano as part of Creative Interventions: A Colloquium in Contemporary Media.
"Expensive-Sounding Sounds:" Interrogating Creativity in Economies of Musical Production
Since the shift to predominantly digital audio recording, manufacturers of software tools have stepped in claiming to make production work faster and easier while unlocking the artist/producer’s creative potential. In 2016, artist Justin Bieber explained to the New York Times Magazine that the way producers Diplo and Skrillex were able to manipulate Ableton on his hit “Where Are Ü Now” resulted in what he affirmatively coined as “expensive-sounding sounds.” More recent messaging around sounds that “stand out” is surging as most major music software outfits roll out new AI tools meant to do everything from automate the engineer’s vocal chain to help the artist quickly find and tailor samples. This talk is an interactive listening exercise that brings together conceptions of creative musical production and interrogates the ways software designers lay claim to and promise creativity. Refusing to take these claims at face value, we will consider several songs, advertisements, and demonstration videos from the last 25 years and ask, what makes a technology “creative” in practice? And under what conditions? Participants are encouraged to assemble examples from their own listening and creative lives and present them for group discussion.
Catherine Provenzano’s research focuses on voice, instrumentality, labor, and technology as they intersect US popular culture. Her forthcoming book, Emotional Signals: Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and the Cultural Politics of Pitch Correction (University of Michigan Press), is an exploration of the history of pitch correction technologies and their musical and social implications. She is also currently researching the political economy of sound and software in megachurch worship contexts. Her writing appears in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Musicology Now, Guernica, and several edited collections. She is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Music Industry at UCLA, and is a songwriter and singer.
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Time: 4 - 5:35pm PST
Location: Online via Zoom
"Expensive-Sounding Sounds:" Interrogating Creativity in Economies of Musical Production
Since the shift to predominantly digital audio recording, manufacturers of software tools have stepped in claiming to make production work faster and easier while unlocking the artist/producer’s creative potential. In 2016, artist Justin Bieber explained to the New York Times Magazine that the way producers Diplo and Skrillex were able to manipulate Ableton on his hit “Where Are Ü Now” resulted in what he affirmatively coined as “expensive-sounding sounds.” More recent messaging around sounds that “stand out” is surging as most major music software outfits roll out new AI tools meant to do everything from automate the engineer’s vocal chain to help the artist quickly find and tailor samples. This talk is an interactive listening exercise that brings together conceptions of creative musical production and interrogates the ways software designers lay claim to and promise creativity. Refusing to take these claims at face value, we will consider several songs, advertisements, and demonstration videos from the last 25 years and ask, what makes a technology “creative” in practice? And under what conditions? Participants are encouraged to assemble examples from their own listening and creative lives and present them for group discussion.
Catherine Provenzano’s research focuses on voice, instrumentality, labor, and technology as they intersect US popular culture. Her forthcoming book, Emotional Signals: Auto-Tune, Melodyne, and the Cultural Politics of Pitch Correction (University of Michigan Press), is an exploration of the history of pitch correction technologies and their musical and social implications. She is also currently researching the political economy of sound and software in megachurch worship contexts. Her writing appears in the Yale Journal of Music and Religion, the Journal of Popular Music Studies, Musicology Now, Guernica, and several edited collections. She is Assistant Professor of Musicology and Music Industry at UCLA, and is a songwriter and singer.
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2025
Time: 4 - 5:35pm PST
Location: Online via Zoom
Reply all
Reply to author
Forward
0 new messages