Just something that popped to mind recently... I think that a good part of the initial exposure I had to Irish was via Irish music, and now that I think of it this probably had an effect on how I tend to pronounce things - especially when one has the tendency to memorise lyrics even if the language is unknown. I started to think that I never really cared that much about the origin of said bands, but that it could be interesting to have an idea on how different regions sound (and I'm not actually talking about dialect as such, merely sonority - with or without other differences).

Given my exposure to Clannad, Altan, even Enya (although the lyrics here are many times almost impossible to follow) I now realise that most of my exposure was to the Donegal variety; the Chieftains had different singers IIRC and I can't place the at the moment.

That being said, and now that I have a slightly better ear and the ability to at least follow the very basics (even if just identifying words or the structure of sentences, etc), I would really like to ear to different traditional Irish music bands from different areas! I would welcome any suggestions and I think this could be useful for future reference as well (even if songs are many times markedly different from the day-to-day speech pattern, of course). Also, listening to music is a sort of "passive/active" kind of thing since one is always tempted to sing along, much to chagrin of those around me

I don't have any suggestions, but I'm very interested in this topic too. Songs are a great asset in learning the language.

Here's a very general description of Sean-nós singing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean-n%C3%B3s_song

Thank you, that is helpful in itself since at least I know I'm not _that_ weird!

Following my own request here are two videos, chosen mostly because they contain a decent amount of lyrics, are rather "clear" and, well, I like them. As I said above both are from up North.

Clannad - Dúlamán
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX9zBdhfIsI

Altan - A Bhean Udaí Thall
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSLp8YJKuWo

I particularly like the Altan sonority in this (I like both though), and I note a small difference in terms of the way Irish sounds in this musics and the way I hear it in, say, Now You're Talking and other material, but I think this is just because it's quite normal for music to have a different rhythm to it (for example, in normal speech I note the "ai" sound more pronounced in Ulster Irish than in the musics)

For Munster, I recommend Iarla Ó Lionaird.

Here's a favorite of mine, from The Highland Sessions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JEiuM_eHuw

You're gonna leave Réalta Theas in a pool of tears with that song!

True...but then, this IS Irish music we're talking about!

I've always wanted to do Caoineadh na dTrí Muire during Holy Week.

Redwolf

heh, heh

Didn't you see what Braoin has posted up? His post is called 'Don't forget about this, a chairde' and it's referring to the song archive at RTÉ - GT4