Today’s conversation is with Charrise Barron, who teaches in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she is an affiliate in African and African American Studies and with the Harvard Data Science Initiative. A practicing gospel artist, she has written scholarly pieces and is the author of the forthcoming The Platinum Age of Gospel: The Years When Crossover Music Changed Everything (2026). In this conversation, we discuss sound and sonic culture, religion and the African American tradition, and the place of religious studies in the Black Studies work.