2025 Research Excellence Award for Humanities: Music can bond us together better than language, new research finds
Dr Patrick Savage of Waipapa Taumata Rau – the University of Auckland has won the Early Career Research Excellence Award for the Humanities for his interdisciplinary research on the relationships between music and language in different cultures.
The paper he led in collaboration with 74 other researchers, Globally, songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than speech: A registered report, has generated international acclaim and media coverage from the likes of The New York Times and Scientific American.
Patrick has led collaborative research by diverse teams of psychologists, computer scientists, ethnomusicologists, professional musicians, and culture-bearers from around the world.
This research has found differences between music and speech that are consistent across cultures, providing evidence for the universality of music, its cultural and biological evolution, and its functions, including social bonding. Patrick aims to promote and preserve cultural heritage and Indigenous knowledge by working with communities to codesign his research questions and methods.
Patrick says his team’s work builds on his earlier studies finding universal aspects of music and speculating on their evolutionary origins.
“But without directly comparing music against speech, we had no way to tell whether these universals uniquely evolved to make music or were just a byproduct of general acoustic systems like speech.”
“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.”
When reflecting on his journey, he says he has always loved both music and science but 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.”
Patrick says society is finally at a stage where young Indigenous and non-Western researchers are being welcomed into the global academic community as equal partners with unique knowledge and insights to contribute to research.
“It is heartbreaking to see the country and the world starting to undo this by cutting funding and support. We need to recommit to this support or risk losing all the progress we’ve made in the last few decades.”
He would like to thank everyone who has supported him on his journey, but “especially the over 100 collaborators on the ‘Many Voices’ projects from around the world who coauthored these articles.”
“It would not have been possible without them, and I hope the award will help to recognise and uplift their voices too.”
Early Career Research Excellence Award for the Humanities:
This award recognises emerging researchers who have demonstrated exceptional promise in the humanities.
Citation:
To Patrick Evan Savage for using inclusive collaboration, combining scientific experiments with local and Indigenous knowledge, to reveal cross-cultural relationships between music and language.