Watch/listen to "Many Voices: A world music podcast" on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts to hear musicians and music researchers from around the world share favourite songs from their own languages/cultures and describe what music means to them. And listen to playlists with full songs at YouTube or Spotify.

Many Voices is an ever-expanding consortium of over 100 musicians and music researchers around the world. We have several ongoing projects dedicated to understanding global relationships between music and language:

Sound: Our first major output ("Many Voices 1") was published in Science Advances. It features the 75 coauthors from 46 countries shown below singing and speaking in our own native/heritage languages. We found consistent acoustic differences betweeen song and speech across 55 different languages (see video below and news coverage in the New York Times and Scientific American). 

Behaviour: Our next experiments ("Many Voices 2 and 3" ) expanded to include over 1,000 participants speaking 30 different languages, and measured not only sound but also participants' attitudes toward each other before and after group singing and speaking. On average, singing bonded participants together substantially better than speaking (full manuscripts with detailed data/analyses coming soon!). 

Meaning: We have started "Many Voices: A world music podcast" to go beyond quantitative measures to delve deeper into the qualitative meanings and stories behind the diverse voices of the world's music and musicians. The opening episodes interview collaborators from Many Voices 1-3 above (e.g., Many Voices 1-3 coauthor and Society for Music Perception and Cognition President Prof. Psyche Loui discussing the Cantonese music of her Hong Kong homeland).

These projects have received funding from Aotearoa New Zealand's Royal Society Te Apārangi (Rutherford Discovery Fellowship and Marsden Fund) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.