Abstract:
Across many musical styles worldwide, vocalists tend to physically gesture while they sing. The qualities and forms of co-singing gestures vary greatly across styles, and gaining insight into the influences on such gesturing is not a trivial task. In this talk, I report on my work exploring co-singing gesture and movement-music relationships in the context of Karnatak music, a style of art and devotional music performed in South India. In particular, I provide an overview of a recent collaboration, examining gesture-vocal coupling in Karnatak music performance (Pearson and Pouw 2022), where we inquired into what features of vocal sound and gesture kinematics are most closely coupled, and in what way. Reflecting on the findings of this study, as well as my previous work on gesture in Karnatak music pedagogy, I propose a framework for thinking about the various influences on co-singing gestures in this, and also other, musical practices.
Bio:
Lara Pearson is a musicologist and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt am Main, Germany). Her work explores bodily and movement dimensions of musical experience and meaning, with a focus on South Indian music practices. In particular, she has researched the gesturing practices of Karnatak vocalists in pedagogical and performance contexts using an interdisciplinary combination of ethnographic and systematic approaches. She has also published on music notation, cross-cultural aesthetics, cultural heritage and the concept of improvisation.