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patrickesavage.bsky.social
Pat Savage
@patrickesavage.bsky.social
2.5K followers 690 following 660 posts
Director: @compmusiclab.bsky.social. Rutherford Discovery Fellow @U Auckland. Assoc. Prof. @Keio U. PI @manyvoices.bsky.social. Music, evolution, diversity. He/him. Tangata tiriti.
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patrickesavage.bsky.social
Pat Savage @patrickesavage.bsky.social · Jun 11
7.5 years after signing the contract, I finally submitted the full manuscript of my book to Oxford University Press!!!
Thanks to Keio's Fukuzawa Fund, it will be published open access. You can already read the submitted version as a preprint at osf.io/b36fm
I hope you all find it useful!
Comparative Musicology Evolution, Universals, and the Science of the World’s Music Patrick E. Savage Senior Research Fellow, School of Psychology, University of Auckland / Waipapa Taumata Rau Associate Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University Contents Prologue: How to read/teach this book ii Epigraphs vi Foreword (Psyche Loui, President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition) x Foreword (Svanibor Pettan, Past President of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance) xii Acknowledgments xiv Ch. 1. Introduction: Aims, chapter structure, and key definitions 1 Ch. 2. Tutorial: Acoustic comparison within and between societies (and species) 12 Ch. 3. History: The rise and fall and rise of comparative musicology 34 Ch. 4. Universals: Absolute, statistical, and non-universal aspects of music beyond the “universal language” metaphor 72 Ch. 5. Evolution: Cultural and biological evolution of music(ality), language, and animal song 94 Ch. 6. Applications: Copyright, music therapy, language acquisition, cultural heritage, social bonding, AI, and beyond 120 Epilogue: “Many Voices” and the future of qualitative comparative musicology 135 Appendix: Companion audio recordings/code availability statement 139 Index 140
patrickesavage.bsky.social
I was deeply honoured to receive the 2025 NZ Research Excellence Award for Humanities tonight. It would never happened without the support of my family and 100+ collaborators, so I was delighted that my parents and several students/collaborators could join!
www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/m...
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. Me with my parents (Martha & Mike Savage) and PhD student (Danya Pavlovich) outside Government House after tonight's Research Honours Aotearoa award ceremony. Me with my honours student, Nelson Shi, outside Government House before the award ceremony.
November 11, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
francescatalamini.bsky.social
Finally, our 4-year long project has been published! We have conducted a multi-lab study comparing STM of musicians and nonmusicians, collecting many other cognitive, personality, musical, and demographic variables!
A big thank you to all collaborators!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Do Musicians Have Better Short-Term Memory Than Nonmusicians? A Multilab Study - Massimo Grassi, Francesca Talamini, Gianmarco Altoè, Elvira Brattico, Anne Caclin, Barbara Carretti, Véronique Drai-Zer...
Musicians are often regarded as a positive example of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when experienced musicians (e.g., musicia...
journals.sagepub.com
November 7, 2025 at 10:49 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
tuomaseerola.bsky.social
Delighted to share our latest research on consonance. We asked participants from India and UK to rate how “tense” different harmonic intervals sound. We found that musicians across both cultures agreed almost perfectly on which intervals feel tense or relaxed, however, ....
November 6, 2025 at 9:44 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
gillianrbrown1.bsky.social
📢 Here is my commentary about the pitfalls of taking an impoverished evolutionary approach to culture, which include 'the limitations of a unidirectional model of evolution' and 'the neglect of niche construction theory'. #ehbea #evolution #psychscisky 🧪

🧵 1/2

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The pitfalls of an impoverished approach to culture: Commentary on Baumard and André
www.sciencedirect.com
November 5, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
zixuanjia.bsky.social
🎶 Excited to share our first Stage 2 manuscript - the Mandarin results from our Many Voices 3 project! Led by me, supervised by @patrickesavage.bsky.social and Suzanne Purdy
📖Our paper replicated the cross-cultural speech-song acoustic differences reported by @yutoozaki.bsky.social. osf.io/gwavn_v1
OSF
osf.io
November 10, 2025 at 8:13 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Bravo Liam (President of the Otago University Students Association) for this eloquent wake-up call for the need to defend the value of universities (in Aotearoa NZ and around the world)
stop treating education as a short-term cost and start seeing it as a long-term nation-building investment in our country’s future. We protect the arts and humanities that create citizens, not just workers
November 10, 2025 at 7:56 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
OK I gave in
doi.org/10.1017/S014...
Music as a coevolved system for social bonding (Zohran for New York parody)
November 10, 2025 at 1:28 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Like so much academic drama, this one also features spreadsheet errors
the spreadsheet initially sent to the PC [Program Committee] included a "grave transposition error"
November 10, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
imanimosley.bsky.social
for my colleagues & friends in the American Musicological Society, a small (but big) update about what has transpired at this year’s meeting www.facebook.com/share/p/17Gz...
Redirecting...
www.facebook.com
November 9, 2025 at 2:52 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Yup
Watson radiated contempt in all directions.” But in a lesson Watson apparently over-learned, “his bad manners were tolerated because of the greatness of the discovery he had made.”
November 9, 2025 at 10:54 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Thrilled to share the first Stage 2 manuscript from this @pci-regreports.bsky.social programmatic protocol, led by @zixuanjia.bsky.social. In Mandarin, we replicated song-speech differences found by @yutoozaki.bsky.social et al., and explored the mediating role of musicianship:
osf.io/gwavn_v1
Table 5. Registered Report Design Planner. Includes three hypotheses (H1-H3). Figure 5. Distributions of mean values of three acoustic features (pitch height, temporal rate, pitch stability) across singing and conversation conditions (n = 20 participants). The participants' mean acoustic values are shown as black dots, with dashed lines connecting each participant's produced speech and song. Figure 8. Scatter plots showing the correlation between effect sizes and Musicianship, in terms of self-perceived (left) and complimented by others (right) ratings. The red line represents the pitch height, blue line represents temporal rate, and green line represents pitch stability.
November 9, 2025 at 9:35 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
rebeccasear.bsky.social
Have definitely come across this reviewer: “This manuscript was not worth my time so I did not read it and recommend rejection.” www.nature.com/articles/d41...
‘Lipstick on a pig’: how to fight back against a peer-review bully
Scientific societies, journals, editors and researchers are pushing back against mean-spirited peer reviews.
www.nature.com
November 9, 2025 at 8:41 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
katemessner.com
Loving today's news that the mysterious "fedora man" outside the Louvre heist was actually a 15-year-old museum visitor who dresses like a 1940s French detective all the time, just because. apnews.com/article/louv...
Fedora man unmasked: Meet the teen behind the Louvre mystery photo
Fifteen-year-old Pedro Elias Garzon Delvaux has become an internet sensation after an Associated Press photo captured him outside the Louvre on the day of a crown jewels heist.
apnews.com
November 9, 2025 at 12:16 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
12tone.nebula.tv
Anyone got a summary of what's happening with AMS? I'm one too many steps removed to have any direct context but all my mutuals are going wild.
November 9, 2025 at 6:49 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
lpachter.bsky.social
Scientific breakthroughs are rarely unique; someone else would’ve made them soon enough. But when prominent scientists cause harm, that harm isn’t inevitable; the world might simply have been better had the harm not been inflicted.
liorpachter.wordpress.com/2018/05/18/j...
James Watson in his own words
“Some anti-Semitism is justified” “Whenever you interview fat people, you feel bad, because you know you’re not going to hire them” “Japan should be bombed for d…
liorpachter.wordpress.com
November 8, 2025 at 4:29 AM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
For you normies who haven’t memorized every quote from The Wire, here is the scene referenced:

youtube.com/shorts/9rU21...
Is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy? [meme]
November 7, 2025 at 10:28 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
rdnarang.bsky.social
Stringer Bell glaring
November 6, 2025 at 12:12 PM
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Extremely exciting and important work showing how inclusive collaboration and Indigenous knowledge doesn’t just enhance social justice, but also leads to better science
rebeccasear.bsky.social Rebecca Sear @rebeccasear.bsky.social · 4d
"Heckenberger relied on the Kuikuro to guide him to the ancient earthworks—which they already knew about—and help him dig and map them. “We built a relationship of trust,” he recalls. “They taught me about their culture, and I taught them how to do archaeology.”" www.science.org/content/arti...
To unearth their past, Amazonian people turn to ‘a language white men understand’
A model partnership between archaeologists and the Kuikuro people has helped rewrite the history of early Amazonian societies
www.science.org
November 7, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
carlbergstrom.com
AI letters are flooding the medical literature. (gift link)

Thanks, Altman.
The Editor Got a Letter From ‘Dr. B.S.’ So Did a Lot of Other Editors.
www.nytimes.com
November 6, 2025 at 9:10 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
lcsnz.bsky.social
I'm sure it's totally coincidental that the AoNZ government's changes to the Marsden Fund have been followed by successful applications led by female investigators dropping from 55% to 33%, and successful applications led by Māori investigators dropping from 13% to 5%. 🫠 🧪
Information on the 2025 Marsden Fund round
Information about the number of funded proposals in the 2025 Marsden Fund round broken down by research area and institution, also including gender and ethnicity data
www.royalsociety.org.nz
November 5, 2025 at 9:16 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
ginnybraun.bsky.social
This story is grim - and one outcome of the ‘business’ model of higher education. Academic freedom at risk not (just) within a country but from external forces…
China-critical UK academics describe ‘extremely heavy’ pressure from Beijing
Reliance on overseas students’ tuition fees under scrutiny as scholars describe chilling effect of being targeted
www.theguardian.com
November 6, 2025 at 5:47 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
culturalevolsoc.bsky.social
👉 A reminder that the deadline for submitting your abstract to the CES 2026 #CESRabat is the 16th of November.

🔗Submit here: airess.fgses-um6p.ma/ces2026

We look forward to seeing you in Rabat!
Cultural Evolution Society 2026 Conference | Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique - FGSES
aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com
November 4, 2025 at 2:15 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
patrickesavage.bsky.social
Something for everyone to hate here! Plenty to agree with, but also strawman arguments, conflating preregistration, replication and Registered Reports, attacking Jussim as preregistration advocate but promoting his anti-wokeism…
your standard is no better to me than the standards imposed by the progressive political cult trying to tell me that the scientific method is an arbitrary cultural construction rooted in white supremacy
November 2, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted by Pat Savage
komaniecki.bsky.social
Already getting targeted ads in Canada mentioning the World Series loss
November 2, 2025 at 4:47 AM
Reposted by Pat Savage
sampassmore.bsky.social
The despair when your niche interest appears has a brief appearance on social media but you miss it by half a day because of time zones / your own kin-ties get up at 4am so you go to bed early 😅

Please check out kinbank.net for all your kinship terminology variational needs!
October 29, 2025 at 10:25 PM