Patrick Savage: why does music do this to me?

As a scientist, Dr Patrick Savage theorises that music evolved in humans to facilitate social bonding; as a singer and performer, he has firsthand experience of this phenomenon at play.

The musicologist’s recently published book, Comparative Musicology: Evolution, Universals and the Science of the World’s Music, explores why all human societies make music, but in such different ways. It draws on recent advances from musicology and related fields, including psychology, linguistics, computer science and evolutionary anthropology, to outline ways to understand and compare all the world’s music.

Comparative musicologists such as Patrick study music’s evolutionary purpose, digging into a mystery first identified by Charles Darwin in 1871, which remains unresolved: since humans didn’t need to make music to survive, why did we evolve to make it?

It’s a challenging question when even hitting on a precise definition of music is “close to impossible”, says Patrick, who last year won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Early Career Research Excellence Award for Humanities.

“Sound organised into regular pitches or rhythms” seems workable, he says, as a way of distinguishing music from most speech, but exceptions persist.

What of a ritual in Papua New Guinea where the mix of human moans and noises from assorted instruments features neither regular beats nor discrete pitches? A sung recitation of the Qur’an may seem enchantingly musical to many but not to those Muslims who consider music forbidden.

But back to that question of music’s evolutionary purpose.

Patrick is the director of the CompMusic Lab for comparative and computational musicology, which he began in 2018 at Keio University in Japan (where he holds tenure). He’s been continuing the lab’s work since winning a five-year Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, which saw him relocate in 2023 to work in the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology.

(In what he describes as “an amazing coincidence”, Patrick is in the same school as Dr Samuel Mehr, the music researcher who runs the citizen science platform The Music Lab, who arrived from Harvard on a Rutherford fellowship the previous year.)

One of Patrick’s most ambitious – and fun – projects compared singing, music and speech across 46 countries and 55 languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Ukrainian, English, Balinese, Cherokee, Spanish, Māori, Basque and Yoruba.

Researchers around the world each sang a traditional song, recited its lyrics, and performed it on an instrument, from whistle to sitar, or by clapping or tapping.

With rare exceptions, the rhythms of songs and instrumental melodies were slower than for speech, with higher and more stable pitches. Slow, predictable sound patterns, Patrick speculated, may be particularly well suited to facilitating synchrony, harmony and social bonding through group singing.

A follow-up study designed by Patrick and collaborators, including PhD students Zixuan Jia and Danya Pavlovich (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine), investigated how group singing increased social bonding compared with talking in a group.

After a small pilot study in Auckland using the classic Exponents song ‘Why does love do this to me?’ researchers around the globe facilitated singing and speaking in small groups involving more than 1,000 people speaking 30 languages.

Singing, it was found, did more for bonding than speaking.

A resurgence in musicology

Music has played a part in the scientist’s life since childhood. The Wisconsin-born Patrick moved to Wellington as a nine-year-old when his geophysicist mother took up a job at Victoria University of Wellington.

Growing up in the capital, he excelled at chess, classical piano and basketball, sang in a barbershop chorus and learned the English folk songs that his father loved.

He returned to the US for university where he studied music composition at Amherst College in Massachusetts. While there, he joined an a cappella chorus called The Zumbyes, which he says was transformative.

“That’s the greatest bonding experience I’ve had through music,” says Patrick. “I went back to a reunion with those guys last year and we all sang together again and it was just super-powerful.”

He was considering career options, including musician or composer, when he came across The Origins of Music, a book that showed tools from evolutionary biology, linguistics and anthropology revitalising musicology, a field that he says had lost its way during the 20th century.

Inspired, Patrick contacted musicologist and psychologist Steven Brown of McMaster University in Canada, one of the book’s co editors. Patrick’s Master of Science under Steven’s supervision at McMaster focused on musical and genetic diversity in Indigenous tribes in Taiwan and the Philippines. Advanced degrees in musicology followed, at Tokyo University of the Arts.

Mindful of the racist and Western-centred biases that shaped much 19th and 20th century cross-cultural research, Patrick emphasises inclusivity in his research and says more Indigenous and non-Western researchers are needed in musicology.

He also aims to foster this inclusivity through his world music podcast, Many Voices. Shining a light on songs sung in the world’s more than 6,000 languages other than English, the podcast involves Patrick asking musicians and music lovers around the world to share seven songs from their own language and culture, teaching listeners what they mean and why they are important.

Home and away

While working as a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland, Patrick has been based in Wellington. He’s back living in his childhood home in Karori, where his parents Mike and Martha still live, along with his wife Sawa, and their children Maika and Kazushi. The family plan to return to Japan in late 2028, but in the meantime, Patrick says he’s grateful his children are getting the opportunity to attend Karori Normal School (as he once did), spend time with their grandparents and learn te reo Māori.

One absence in the home that weighs heavily, however, is that of Patrick’s younger brother Kelly. While teaching English in Japan, he died of a cardiac arrest in 2017 after being admitted to a Japanese psychiatric hospital during a manic episode, subsequently being restrained over ten days. The scandal received extensive news coverage and the family has since campaigned against such practices in Japan.

Outside of work and family time, Patrick has been enjoying mountain biking at Mākara Peak in Karori and has rejoined Vocal FX Chorus – a Wellington barbershop group he sang with in his early 20s.

He may not be able to define exactly what music is – but he knows it when he sings it.

Comparative Musicology: Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World’s Music is available free online.

– Paul Panckhurst