UNIVERSITÄT ZU KÖLN

Vertretungsprofessorin für Musikethnologie

Musikwissenschaftliches Institut

Albertus-Magnus-Platz

D-50923 Köln

Büro: Hauptgebäude, Raum 

Sprechstunde: nach Vereinbarung per E-Mail

E-Mail: lpearson@uni-koeln.de

 

 

Biography

Lara Pearson studied ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths, University of London (MA 2012) and completed her PhD at Durham University, UK (2016) with a thesis on gesture in Karnatak music pedagogy in South India. She was a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Tübingen (2016-2017) and then a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main (2018-2025). In 2025 she was appointed as Interim Professor for Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne. Her research focuses on bodily and movement dimensions of musical experience and meaning. To date, she has explored this primarily in Karnatak music performance and pedagogy, using an interdisciplinary combination of ethnographic and multimodal analytical approaches. In addition, she has published on music notation, cross-cultural aesthetics, cultural heritage and improvisation. For her work on gesture in Karnatak music pedagogy she received the Aubrey Hickman Award of the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE) and the Martin Hatch Prize, awarded by the Society for Asian Music. She is currently the vice-chair of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance study group on Sound Movement and the Sciences (ICTMD-SoMoS). 

Research Interests

• Karnatak music performance and pedagogy in South India
• Co-singing gesture
• Music analysis from an embodied perspective
• Socially situated aesthetics
• Improvisation
• Music notation

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. (accepted). Adjusting to the Other: Audiencing Through Gesture in Karnatak Vocal Lessons. Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

Pearson, L., Nuttall, T., & Pouw, W. (preprint). Landscapes of Coarticulation: The Co-structuring of Gesture-vocal Dynamics in Karnatak Vocal Performance. OSF. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/npm96

Nuttall, T., Serra, X., Pearson, L. (accepted) Svara-forms in Carnatic Music: Contextual Influences on the Performance of Svara. WIMAGA Satellite Workshop of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2025).

Nuttall, T., Serra, X., & Pearson, L. (2024). Svara-forms and Coarticulation in Carnatic music: An Investigation Using Deep Clustering. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology. https://doi.org/10.1145/3660570.3660580

Pearson, L., & Manickavasakan, B. (2023). Annotating Karnataka Music: Encounters Between a Musical Tradition and Computational Tools. In F. Bonini Baraldi (Ed.), Second Symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Sound, Movement, and the Sciences (SoMoS) (pp. 23–27). https://zenodo.org/records/10423805

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/