Digital Commons Network^™

Gendered Discourses And Classed Access Routes For Feminist Djs In Irish Subcultural Scenes, Andrea Cleary

Irish Communication Review

This article examines feminist collectives in Ireland’s electronic/dance music (E/DM) and music technology (MT) scenes, focusing on how gender and class intersect to shape access and participation. Drawing on thematic analysis of interviews with five collective members active between 2016 and 2025, it traces paths to participation from "musical homes" to instrument education to university DJ societies. To do this, it examines the overlapping family, cultural and subcultural capitals which shaped their journeys. Finally, this article considers the role of feminist collectives in creating alternative educational spaces and networks for women and gender minority participation in E/DM cultures.

‘It’S The Best Person For The Job’: Gendering Logic And The Hiring Practices Of Music Organisations In Ireland, Yvonne Kiely Dr

Irish Communication Review

Despite calls for reform in the allocation of jobs in music industries, little is known about how music organisations operate internally and the day-to-day realities that male and female workers must navigate. Findings of bullying and harassment in the arts sector by the Irish Theatre Institute prompted the Irish government in 2022 to issue a set of recommendations aimed at reforming the working conditions and gender divisions of labour of arts sector organisations under its remit. These recommendations were made in the absence of academic studies of music organisations in Ireland, and in the absence of centralised data about these …

Inventing New Pilgrimage And Religious Tourism In Lombok, Indonesia, Ujang Mahadi, Moch. Khafidz Fuad Raya, Aibdi Rahmat, Jonsi Hunadar, Rindom Harahap

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In the contemporary Muslim world, especially in Indonesia, the boom in religious tourism is increasingly widespread after the discovery of the grave sites of saints (wali) or people who are considered holy. More than that, pilgrimage is increasingly popular when these sites display natural views and multifaceted aspects, thereby adding to the intimacy of Islamic meditation and veneration rituals. This article focuses on five holy tombs in Lombok (West Nusa Tenggara), considered tombs of Muslim saints. Using ethnography with observational techniques and unstructured interviews, we explore the construction of veneration and the marketing efforts of pilgrimages to the …

Radif Corpus: A Symbolic Dataset For Non-Metric Iranian Classical Music, Maziar Kanani, Sean O’Leary, James Mcdermott

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Non-metric music forms the core of the repertoire in Iranian classical music. Dastgā hi music serves as the underlying theoretical system for both Iranian art music and certain folk traditions. At the heart of Iranian classical music lies the radif, a foundational repertoire that organizes melodic material central to performance and pedagogy. In this study, we introduce the first digital corpus representing the complete non-metrical radif repertoire, covering all 13 existing components of this repertoire. We provide MIDI files (about 281 minutes in total) and data spreadsheets describing notes, note durations, intervals, and hierarchical structures for 228 pieces of music. …

Out Of The Frying Pan And Into The Fire: Food As Community Archives In Ireland, Ella Padden

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

Food permeates every aspect of life; there is no class or culture that does not eat, no society that has not developed its own cuisine. Since 2010, twenty-nine entries related to food have been added to the UNESCO Representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, designating food as a complex marker of cultural heritage. This paper argues that as archives seek to preserve and steward culture, they must consider how that includes food records. Food records in Ireland are decentralized, and few in number, leaving a gap in cultural repositories. Through semi-structured interviews, this thesis analyses the interactions between archivists and …

‘Is This Song A Rebel Song?’: Republican Legitimacy And The Contested Narratives Of The Irish Revolutionary Soundscape, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

This article will demonstrate how the diverse body of musical narratives broadly collectivised as ‘Irish rebel songs’ exhibit multi-layered categorisation difficulties beyond those typically pertaining to the wider canon of traditional folksong. Due to the systemic, often febrile, contestation surrounding ideological legitimacy within the Irish national struggle, such texts must necessarily navigate multiple historico-political complexities, foremost of which is the dogmatically essentialised, yet organisationally splintered, tradition of physical-force Irish Republicanism. Such disputed ideological demarcations encourage a notable subjectivity in terms of how rebel songs are viewed from both musicological and political perspectives in Ireland to the present, a liminality reflected …

Traumas And Exile, Music As An Instrument Of Psychoanalysis, Marco Ramelli

Conference papers

Gerhard was able to create works of great richness that connect distant musical styles, extra- musical narratives, autobiographical references, and abstract musical concepts. The composer lived through extraordinarily tumultuous times, including the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, as an exile in England. Away from his homeland, he maintained a pacifist stance, firmly opposing Franco's regime. It was Gerhard's personal connection to the Civil War that may have prompted the BBC to commission him to write incidental music for adaptations of two important books set during the Spanish Civil War. In both compositions,9 The Revenge for Love (1957) …

Déan É Tú Féin – Diy Music And Music Culture In Ireland: Introduction, Caroline Ann O'Sullivan

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

“800 Years We Have Been Down”: Rebel Songs And The Retrospective Reach Of The Irish Republican Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

From the glamorous, cross-dressing “Rebel, Rebel” of David Bowie, to the righteous Trenchtown “Soul Rebel” of Bob Marley and The Wailers, both varied and various musical articulations of cultural and socio-political rebellion have long enjoyed a ubiquitous presence across multiple soundscapes. As a musicological delineator in Ireland, however, ‘rebel’ conveys a specifically political dynamic due to its consistent deployment as an all-encompassing descriptor for songs detailing events and personalities from the Irish national struggle. This paper sets out to examine the specific musical delineator of “rebel song” from both musicological and politico-ideological perspectives with a view to interrogating its appropriateness …

Preserving Irish Smoked Salmon: Food Producers, Cultural Heritage, And Environmental Conservation, Malia Guyer-Stevens

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

This research argues that the bottom-up heritagization of smoked salmon by Irish smoked salmon producers is an integral piece in the movement to protect wild Atlantic salmon in Irish waters. Wild Atlantic salmon in Ireland have transformed over the centuries from mythological figure to luxury export, and today into national food heritage thanks to the efforts of smoked salmon producers. This designation transforms Irish salmon from a wild animal into a symbol of Ireland’s historic ties to their coastal regions, an embodiment of traditional food practices, and projects the fish’s importance into the future. However, wild Irish salmon face extinction …

The Global Encounter As Communitas: Inter-Pilgrim Musicking Along The Contemporary Camino De Santiago, Hannah Snavely

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

In an effort to provide new ways of theorising pilgrimages as global encounters (White, 2012) and sites of cosmopolitan interactions, I offer a sound-centred investigation into inter-pilgrim musical events that occurred along the Camino de Santiago (Camino), a historically Catholic pilgrimage in northern Spain. This ethnomusicological perspective on the Camino highlights contemporary pilgrim rituals and artistic practices that are frequently overlooked in other Camino scholarship, which tends to focus on historical musics or the tangible arts. On the Camino, music primarily facilitates cross-cultural encounters for pilgrims, though at varied levels of mis/understandings. This paper explores the ways that participatory musicking …

Integrating Sensor Technology Into Artistic Practice: A Critical Examination Of The Role Of The Performer, Marcella Barz

Doctoral

This research questions how interactive music technology might enable creativity in performers. The format is a semi-autoethnographic narrative that follows the performer’s artistic process of preparing nine compositions for performance; these works are for bass clarinet or clarinet and live processing (created with Ableton Live, Max for Live, and the SABRe multi-sensor and remote).

In order to conduct this research, I remixed two existing bass clarinet works, collaborated with two composers on six new works, and composed my own piece. I maintained a reflective journal for four and a half years that documented the process of preparing these compositions for …

Audience Influence On The Composition, Revision And Interpolation Of Traditional Irish Ballad Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Doctoral

The following thesis critically examines the essential thematic malleability of traditional Irish song narrative, with particular focus on the penetrative influence of the audience on both composer and performer alike. Such narrative fluidity is specifically examined within the context of works narrating attested historical events, output which could be reasonably assumed to adhere to factual and chronological consistency. The research concludes that the audience continuously exerts a powerful cultural influence on the performance space, and further demonstrates the considerable extremes that both composers and singers will routinely embrace in order to satisfy the constantly shifting demands of their audiences, even …

Songs And The Soil, Mark Garry, Louise Reddy

Books/Book Chapters

Published in conjuction with an exhibition. The exhibition engages with the subjects of landscape and music/sound—exploring each element from historical, social and culturally associative perspectives; where landscape is recognised as a fluid term articulating physical space, idealised space and social space that reflects a convergence of physical processes and cultural meaning, and where song act as a response to, or archive, of personal, historical or socio-political instances. Several works engage landscape and musical sound intersect. The exhibition integrates a broad range of media,positions and responses to these research subjects; including two film works, a six-hour soundtrack for a room, sonic …

The Influence Of Santería In Leo Brouwer's Solo Guitar Works (1955–1993), Eoin Flood

Doctoral

This study will assess the solo guitar works of Cuban composer Leo Brouwer (1939–present) in terms of influence from Santería, a ritual music derived from WestAfrican slaves and still practised in Cuba. This will be achieved by using both analytical and evaluative processes. For the former, a range of influential parameters have been identified, each falling under three strands: rhythmic and metric, structural, and melodic. These will be revealed in all of Brouwer’s solo guitar works written from 1955 to 1993. A parameter’s influence can be revealed in two ways: the multitude of its usage per piece, or the percentage …

Sunésis: Evolving Aesthetic Discourse In Traditional Music Practices In Ireland, Nollaig Ó Fiongháile

Research Theses

The enquiry ‘Súnesis’ investigates aesthetic awareness in traditional music practices in Ireland and seeks to evolve an aesthetic discourse with the practices at hand.Súnesis undertakes a critical examination of a suite of performances from contemporary and traditional folk music practices in Ireland. Engaging an interpretative model evolved by Paul Ricoeur, the author designs a dimensional pathway to articulate the modes of consciousness and aesthetic awareness at work in the creative act.

It is proposed that a rethinking of traditional folk music is required, beyond the disciplinary, geographical or political boundaries more typically conceived in music studies. With an alternate …

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: A Performance Science Model Using Symbolic Approximation, Eamon O Doherty

Doctoral

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any …

Instrumental Music Learning In An Irish Bimusical Context, Mary Nugent

Doctoral

This study focuses on bimusical instrumental learning, exploring the perceptions, beliefs and musical practices of students who are simultaneously engaged in learning classical and Irish traditional musics. The literature on bimusicality addresses how it has evolved in various social and educational contexts. This research focuses on the bimusical learning processes and practices of students, aged sixteen to twenty years, as they cross between the different learning modes associated with these two musical traditions in an Irish context. This qualitative study adopts a collective case study approach, using a purposive sampling strategy. Data collected include: videotaped lessons, recorded practice/playing sessions, observations …

Western Travellers In The Land Of The Buddha Legitimising Travel Through The Religionification Of Tourism, François Thibeault

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

On the one hand, tourism has developed to such a point that it now shapes other social realities in global society. On the other hand, pilgrimage phenomena are thriving in the twenty-first century, as they become both more globalised and more particularised. This paper shows that drawing oppositions between pilgrimage and tourism assumes an exclusive, dichotomous view that is misleading. Instead, I insist on an understanding of the reciprocal influence between religion and tourism in which neither of the two spheres subjects itself to the other. The argument is based on the understandings and discourses of legitimation that Westerners travelling …

John Williams: An Evaluation Of His Impact Upon The Culture Of The Classical Guitar, Michael O'Toole

Doctoral

This thesis examines the career of the Australian guitarist John Williams and his impact upon the culture of the classical guitar. Williams has been a celebrated guitarist for more than six decades and has performed and recorded extensively during that period. He has made a remarkably varied contribution to guitar culture, performing in a wide variety of different styles, highlighting the guitar’s unique strength as a versatile and adaptable instrument. Williams’ career is in marked contrast to that of many of his contemporaries, including his mentor Andrés Segovia. Segovia believed the classical guitar must assert its individuality in order to …

The Evolution Of The Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra 1926–1954, Patrick Joseph Kehoe

Doctoral

2RN, later to be re-named Radio Éireann, the Dublin-based Irish state broadcasting station, was established in 1926, and in that year it engaged five string players and a pianist to constitute the ‘Station Orchestra’. This chamber ensemble was incrementally enlarged over the following years by the recruitment of additional string players together with brass, woodwind and percussion. The ‘Orchestra’ performed a wide range of different kinds of music and was augmented to provide broadcasts of symphony concerts. In the late 1940s it was decided to bring the Orchestra up to symphonic strength, to devote it solely to art music, and …

"Then To Death Walked, Softly Smiling": Violence And Martyrdom In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

This article critically considers the representation of death within the song tradition of modern Irish Republicanism. I explore how such representations have changed in parallel with the various ideological metamorphoses that Irish Republicanism has undergone, specifically in the twentieth century. I argue that the centrality of self-sacrifice has resulted in the development of ballad narratives that deliberately obfuscate on the issue of Republican violence, resulting in the deaths of all Republican militants (regardless of cause or context), ultimately portrayed as a form of heroic self-martyrdom.

San alt seo, déantar anailís chriticiúil ar léiriú an bháis i dtraidisiún amhránaíocht Phoblachtach na …

“Young Men Of Erin, Our Dead Are Calling”: Death, Immortality And The Otherworld In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

Irish physical-force Republicanism has long been noted for its tendency to promote the tropes of martyrdom and immortality as core tenets of its ideological belief system. This essay sets out to examine the genre of Republican death ballads so as to identify how such essentialist concepts are represented and promoted within the attendant song tradition. Particular attention will be paid to works that deploy overtly supernatural tropes in order to articulate the key Republican concept of heroic immortality. The present research will demonstrate the consistency with which such narrative devices have been retained within the Republican song tradition into the …

The Aepem Collection: A Set Of Annotated Traditional French Music Scores, Pierre Beauguitte

Conference papers

The aim of this paper is to present the AEPEM collection, consisting of more than five thousand scores of French traditional melodies. The original material and the digitized collection are described. A short statistical analysis is performed to compare this collection to existing ones in terms of melodic profiles.

Creolisation In Music Traditions: South Connemara, The Scottish Western Isles And Francophone Louisiana, Brian Ó Huiginn

Doctoral

Why do people mix musics? What causes them to break down the boundaries between music genres and produce new genres that are a mix of others, and what does a melody migrating between cultures have to do to conform to a new music culture? Researchers such as Bruno Nettl, John Blacking, George List and Mark Slobin have over the past eighty years or more, attempted to look at the issue of music mixing under the headings of diffusion, acculturation and globalisation. This thesis seeks to further the understanding of this phenomenon, by examining three cases of cultures that are known …

The Creation Of Meaning And Identity In The Dublin Jazz Scene, Past And Present., Damian Evans

Doctoral

The narrative of jazz performance in Ireland is unique due to the political changes that coincided with the arrival of jazz and the influence these changes had on the nation. Over the last one hundred years, jazz performance in Dublin has represented contrasting values for different people. What has remained consistent is the notion of participation within a network of musicians, audience members, promotors and institutions that make up a scene. To participate in a scene is to be actively involved in contestation and negotiation as individuals and groups seek to create meaning and identity through jazz performance. In this …

A Pattern Mining Approach To Study A Collection Of Dutch Folk-Songs, Peter Van Kranenburg, Darrell Conklin

Papers

No abstract provided.

Note, Cut And Strike Detection For Traditional Irish Flute Recordings, Islah Ali-Maclachlan, Maciej Tomczak, Carl Southall, Jason Hockman

Papers

This paper addresses the topic of note, cut and strike detection in Irish traditional music (ITM). In order to do this we first evaluate state of the art onset detection methods for identifying note boundaries. Our method utilises the results from manually and automatically segmented flute recordings. We then demonstrate how this information may be utilised for the detection of notes and single note articulations idiomatic of this genre for the purposes of player style identification. Results for manually annotated onsets achieve 86%, 70% and 74% accuracies for note, cut and strike classification respectively. Results for automatically segmented recordings are …

Proceedings Of The 6th International Workshop On Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Papers

The Folk Music Analysis Workshop brings together computational music analysis and ethnomusicology. Both symbolic and audio representations of music are considered, with a broad range of scientific approaches being applied (signal processing, graph theory, deep learning). The workshop features a range of interesting talks from international researchers in areas such as Indian classical music, Iranian singing, Ottoman-Turkish Makam music scores, Flamenco singing, Irish traditional music, Georgian traditional music and Dutch folk songs. Invited guest speakers were Anja Volk, Utrecht University and Peter Browne, Technological University Dublin.

Segmentation Of Folk Songs With A Probabilistic Model, Ciril Bohak, Matija Marolt

Papers

Structure is an important aspect of music. Musical structure can be recognized in different musical modalities such as rhythm, melody, harmony or lyrics and plays a crucial role in our appreciation of music. In recent years many researchers have addressed the problem of music segmentation, mainly for popular and classical music. Some of the more recent approaches are Mauch et al. (2009), Foote (2000), Serr`a et al. (2012) and McFee & Ellis (2014). Last three are included in the music structure analysis framework MSAF Nieto & Bello (2015). None of the mentioned approaches however, addresses the specifics of folk music. …