Dr Sam Mehr at the University of Auckland Photo: Matt Crawford / Royal Society Te Apārangi
Follow Our Changing World on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRADIO or wherever you listen to your podcasts
Spotify is open on Dr Sam Mehr’s work computer. He’s halfway through Billie Eilish’s new album, which he’s enjoying.
“I listen to every Billie Eilish album that comes out. I mean, she’s great and it’s kind of wild, why she’s great to me.”
It’s one of his side interests, homing in on supremely popular music to figure out the secret sauce of what makes it so well-liked.
But his main research focus is the basic psychology of music – why and how our brains process music.
The psychology of an everyday thing
Think of the space that music occupies in your life. Do you listen daily? On your commute? To get pumped up in the gym? Do you hear it all around – radios, cafés, the supermarket, TikTok videos? Maybe you sing or play an instrument. But have you ever stopped to wonder... why?
“No species other than humans have something like music. Other species have vocalisations that might sound a bit like music, but they're very, very different in their functions and in their design than the human music faculty is,” says Sam.
“Just the fact that we're doing it in the first place is like, wait a minute, what's that about?”
Based now at the University of Auckland, Sam’s own musical background paved the way for what he researches. He played piano from a young age, saxophone at school and then went to a music conservatory to study music education at third level. It was while running classes for very young kids with their parents that he started to ponder about the psychology behind it all.
Is it a universal language?
While a highly produced Billie Eilish album might be an entertaining listen, when it comes to answering the fundamental psychological questions about how humans interact with music, Sam focuses on more basic forms of music that have been around for much longer.
Something he and collaborators have been working on for over a decade now is the Natural History of Song project – a collection of vocal music from all around the world, with recorded context for each piece of music. There are 118 recordings, divided into four categories – lullaby, love, dance, and healing songs. (You can explore the recordings in this interactive visualisation of the project.)
One of the questions they wanted to answer using this collection was: are these types of songs recognisable across cultures and languages? To do this they ran a series of experiments within the lab, where they played different music to participants and asked them to categorise it. They also used a website game to ask people on the internet. Plus, they sent recordings back out into the field with anthropologists to ask those who live in remote places with cultures very different to those of us who spend our days online.
Baby lab tone experiment. Photo: Royal Society Te Apārangi
It turns out that, in general, people are quite good at recognising lullabies and dance songs, though less so for healing and love songs.
From there, a new series of questions evolved. Do lullabies really work to calm babies down? Does singing to your baby have a long-term effect on their mood or temperament? And what are infants even able to hear at that young age?
Listen to Claire and Sam to learn how the team are answering these questions, plus hear from other researchers working on how infants focus on the tones of different languages, and an expansion to the Natural History of Song project.
Learn more
-
Psychologists from the University of Auckland are also investigating anauralia – a term for those who lack the ability to hear sounds in their minds.
-
Researchers are using high-tech scanning and 3D printing techniques to help the revitalisation of Moriori music and culture.
-
Dr Sam Mehr had a wide-ranging chat about his research, and the ‘music as cheesecake’ evolutionary theory with Bryan Crump in November 2023.
-
Sam won the MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize at the 2023 Prime Minister's Science Prizes. Learn more about some of the other winners in this episode from May 2024.
