Dr. Lara Pearson
Research Areas
- Gesture and physical movement in musical contexts
- Karnatak music of South India
- Socially situated aesthetics
- Improvisation
- Music notation
Vita
Academic Education
| 2012–2016 | Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Durham, UK with a thesis on gesture in South Indian art music |
| 2011–2012 | MA in Ethnomusicology (with Distinction) at Goldsmiths, University of London |
Career
| Since 2018 | Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Music Department | |
| 2016–2017 | Postdoctoral fellow at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen | |
| 2013–2017 | Part-time teacher at the University of Durham, UK | |
| 2008–2011 | Fieldwork and practical music studies in South India |
Publications
Edited Volume
Hamilton, A., & Pearson, L. (Eds.), (2020). The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished. London: Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN: 9781350106055
Journal Articles and Book Sections
Pearson, L. and Ramanujacharyulu, T.K.V. (in press). Handwritten Notation in Karnatak Music: Memory and the Mediation of Social Relations. In, Federico Celestini und Sarah Lutz (Eds.), Musikalische Schreibszenen / Scenes of Musical Writing, Paderborn: Wilhlem Fink Verlag (Theorie der musikalischen Schrift, 4).
Nuttall, T., Plaja-Roglans, G., Pearson, L., & Serra, X. (2022). In Search of Sañcāras: Tradition-informed Repeated Melodic Pattern Recognition in Carnatic Music. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), Bengaluru, India. http://hdl.handle.net/10230/54155
Pearson, L. (2022). A Social Aesthetics and Ethics of Imperfection: Insights from Karnatak Music, Jazz and Free Improvisation. In P. Cheyne (Ed.), Imperfectionist Aesthetics in Art and Everyday Life. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003251361-9
Pearson, L., & Pouw, W. (2022). Gesture–vocal Coupling in Karnatak Music Performance: A Neuro–bodily Distributed Aesthetic Entanglement. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14806
Pearson, L. (2022). Inscription, Gesture, and Social Relations: Notation in Karnatak Music. In E. Payne & F. Schuiling (Eds.), Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429342837-13
Nuttall, T., Plaja, G., Pearson, L., Serra, X. (2021) The Matrix Profile for Motif Discovery in Audio - An Example Application in Carnatic Music. In, Proceedings of the 15th International Symposium on CMMR, Online (pp. 109-118). https://cmmr2021.github.io/proceedings/pdffiles/cmmr2021_13.pdf
Wald-Fuhrmann, M., Pearson, L., Roeske, T., Grüny, C., & Polak, R. (2021). Music as a trait in evolutionary theory: A musicological perspective. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,44, E93. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X20001193
Pearson, L. (2021). “Improvisation” in Play: A View through South Indian Music Practices. In A. Bertinetto & M. Ruta (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation in the Arts (pp. 446-461). Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003179443-35
Pearson, L. (2021). A Socially Situated Aesthetics: Arguments from Anthropology and Neuroaesthetics. Proceedings from First Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Sound, Movement, and the Sciences (pp. 32-34). https://zenodo.org/record/5514167#.YhfPo5PMLOQ
Pearson, L. (2021). Cultural Specificities in Carnatic and Hindustani Music: Commentary on the Saraga Open Dataset. Empirical Musicology Review, 16(1), 166-171. http://dx.doi.org/10.18061/emr.v16i1.7974
Pearson, L. (2021). »Die Sozialisation der Sinne« Ästhetik, Kultur und Kontext. Musik Und Ästhetik, 100, 87–93. https://www.musikundaesthetik.de/content/pdf/99.120205/mu-25-4-76.pdf
Pearson, L. (2020). A Socially Situated Approach to Aesthetics: Games and Challenges in Karnatak Music. In A. Hamilton & L. Pearson (Eds.), The Aesthetics of Imperfection in Music and the Arts: Spontaneity, Flaws and the Unfinished (pp. 61-72). London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350106086.0016
Jacoby, N., Margulis, EH, Clayton, M., Hannon, E., Honing, H., Iversen, J., Klein, TR, More, SA, Pearson, L., Peretz, I., Perlman, M ., Polak, R., Ravignani, A., Savage, PE, Steingo, G., Stevens, CJ, Trainor, L., Trehub, S., Veal, M., & Wald-Fuhrmann, M. (2020) , Cross-cultural work in music cognition. Music Perception, 37 (3), 185-195. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2020.37.3.185
Pearson, L. (2018). Cultural Heritage, Sustainability and Innovation in South Indian Art Music. In B. Norton and N. Matsumoto (Eds.), Music as Heritage: Historical and Ethnographic Perspectives . Aldershot: Routledge. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781315393865-12
Pearson, L. (2016). Coarticulation and Gesture: An Analysis of Melodic Movement in South Indian Raga Performance. Music Analysis , 35 (3), 280-313. https://doi.org/10.1111/musa.12071
Pearson, L. (2013). Gesture and the Sonic Event in Karnatak Music. Empirical Musicology Review, 8 (1), 2-14. https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v8i1.3918
PhD Thesis
Pearson, L. (2016). Gesture in Karnatak Music: Pedagogy and Musical Structure in South India. (PhD), University of Durham. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11782/
Awards & Grants
Awards & Grants
| 2017 | Aubrey Hickman Award given by SEMPRE (Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research) |
| 2015 | Martin Hatch Award given by the Society for Asian Music |
| 2014 | iARC (Institute of Advanced Research Computing) Digital Humanities Durham Postgraduate Research Award |
| 2014 | Durham University Arts and Humanities Faculty Postgraduate Research Award |
| 2014 | ERASMUS Mobility Award to conduct motion analysis at the University of Oslo |
| 2013 | SEMPRE (Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research) Gerry Farrell Travel Award for fieldwork in India |
| 2012–2015 | Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Studentship Award |
Projects
- Musical motion: the experience and aesthetics of movement in South Indian raga performance
The interconnection between music and movement can be observed in everyday life: for example, in the tendency for people to move along with music, and to use motion-related words when talking about music. In response, musicologists and ...