Allison Wente is Assistant Professor of Music at The State University of New York at Fredonia. She earned a PhD in Music Theory from The University of Texas at Austin (2016), where she was a Graduate Continuing Fellow for her final year of study. She also holds degrees from Muhlenberg College (2009) and The University of Wisconsin-Madison (2011). Dr. Wente’s work focuses on mechanical instruments and recording technologies, specifically the player piano in early twentieth-century America. Her dissertation, “Magical Mechanics: The Player Piano in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” explores the displacement of labor, technological mediation, and the differences between analog and digital technologies as they materialize in early recording media. She has presented her work at several regional and national conferences including the Music and the Moving Image conference in New York City and two annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory. Along with James Buhler, Dr. Wente recently co-authored an essay entitled "'Better Music at Smaller Cost': Selling Mechanical Instruments to American Motion Picture Houses in the 1910s" for the forthcoming book Music and Sound in Silent Cinema: From the Nickelodeon to The Artist, an edited collection on Music in Silent Film for the Routledge Music and Screen Media Series. Dr. Wente is currently working on two additional essays, one which discusses various examples of advertisements for the player piano and the emphasis placed upon themes like labor, gender, and education, and a second article that organizes “machine” music into categories encompassing a wide variety of performing bodies, audiences, and spaces in order to draw larger conclusions regarding the widespread influence of the machine aesthetic on early twentieth-century music culture.