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. (2023). 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). https://doi.org/10.30965/9783846767146_012
Plaja-Roglans, G., Nuttall, T., Pearson, L., Serra, X., & Miron, M. (2023). Repertoire-Specific Vocal Pitch Data Generation for Improved Melodic Analysis of Carnatic Music. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 6(1) (pp. 13-26). https://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.137
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 ...
- Gesture in Contemporary Beatbox Performance
While advanced vocal techniques lie at the heart of contemporary beatboxing, skilled beatbox artists also gesture in their performances, creating intricate and highly effective intertwinings of sound and body movement. This research project is a ...