Tapping into music and speech nets top award

University of Auckland's Dr Patrick Savage has won the Early Career Research Excellence Award for the Humanities for interdisciplinary research into the relationships between music and language across cultures.

In collaboration with 74 researchers, he led a research project showing songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher pitched and use more stable pitches than speech. 

Researchers from 46 countries performed traditional music and spoke in their own languages to provide material for comparison. 

The New York Times reported the study as: `Why do people make music?'

Psychologists, computer scientists, ethnomusicologists, professional musicians, and culture-bearers from around the world have all collaborated with the scientist, who works in the School of Psychology.  

Savage's research found consistent differences between music and speech across cultures, contributing to evidence for the universality of music, its cultural and biological evolution, and functions including social bonding.

“Our new findings suggest that music does indeed have some unique qualities that may help bond us together better than language can, an idea also supported by preliminary data from our follow-up studies," says Savage.

In love with music and science, Savage struggled to decide which to pursue - until he realised he could combine both.

“I enjoyed studying in the US and living in my wife’s home country of Japan for over a decade, but I was also delighted to get the chance to return home to Aotearoa New Zealand, thanks to a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship.”

“Things had changed a lot after being away for two decades – I’m delighted that my kids get to grow up hearing more te reo Māori in school and more native bird songs outside than I did when growing up here.”

He's concerned that the trend for increased participation by young Indigenous and non-Western researchers in the global academic community could be reversed.

“It is heartbreaking to see the country and the world starting to undo this by cutting funding and support," he says. "We need to recommit to this support or risk losing all the progress we’ve made in the last few decades.”

Savage thanks his collaborators around the world,  and says the award uplifts their voices too.