Kearney, William (2024) Learning by Ear: Multimodal listening and the Embodiment of Irish Traditional Music and Dance. In: British Forum for Ethnomusicology & International Council for Traditional Music Ireland Joint-Annual Conference, 4-7 April, Cork, Ireland. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In Irish traditional music and dance, listening to other encultured performers is understood as being vital in embodying key stylistic and aesthetic traits of the tradition. In this sense, listening forms part of the broader processes of learning by ear and includes in-person experiences, listening to recorded music, and in more recent times 'cross-modal' listening on platforms such as YouTube - which also provide contextualising visual information. Perhaps because traditional music is conceptualised as being an aural art form, and because diAerent combinations of sensory information are present in each of the previously mentioned examples, 'listening' and 'watching' are often described as constituent parts of absorption, which can have the eAect of separating the senses. As recent thought on listening has shown, any real-life listening event is multimodal, where auditory, visual, haptic and other sensory input combine in informing a coherent experience. Rather than being reactive, the listeners' internal model of this experience is predicted, based on their prior experiential knowledge of the same sensory input. As such, listening experiences are not universal and are instead shaped by individual enculturation. For musicians and dancers in particular, this process of embodiment is inherently multimodal and so creates a heightened association between sound (gesture) and physical gesture. From this, it follows that even 'monomodal' sources such as audio recordings, are listened to from a multimodal perspective, one which positively correlates with the experiential knowledge of the listener.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > Music
Item ID:	18441
Depositing User:	William Kearney
Date Deposited:	30 Apr 2024 13:35
Refereed:	No
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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