In response to Lighter's May 3, 2016 reply:

That remark I quoted about a person who bursts out laughing at the sound of Máire Ní Scolaí singing sean-nós: it was a very terse remark and left much to conjecture. However there was an equally laconic sentence there, which said, "not 'trad' enough." And it is no secret that Ní Scolaí had a singing technique that was highly trained and schooled, a technique from an entirely different genre of music. As posts on another thread have stated, Ní Scolaí had a technique of breath support comparable to one of the great classical singers. By this I mean, she learned how to breathe so as to support her own voice resonance with a buoyant yet sturdy column of air, engaging the muscles around the diaphragm and probably the intercostal muscles around the back of the ribcage. You have to train like an athlete in order to breathe like that. The result is more like chanting than like speech. Ní Scolaí's recordings show a voice with a really polished, deliberate sound, which to some ears will seem unnatural to the point of artifice. Maybe that is why it made somebody laugh.