Welcome to our lab!

Welcome to the CompMusic Lab for comparative and computational musicology! We study the science of the world's music with the aim of promoting cross-cultural diversity, understanding, and harmony (literally and figuratively).

A free book summarising our past and future research, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music", can be read at https://osf.io/b36fm (a version with fancier type-setting will be officially published by Oxford University Press in 2026).

For an accessible introduction to our research, check out the following media coverage:

These New York Times and Nautilus pieces on music, language, evolution, universals, and social bonding (featuring our articles in Science Advances, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences)
This Undark piece about diversifying music science (featuring our publications in Science Advances, Nature Human Behaviour, and Nature Reviews Neuroscience jointly including over 100 authors from over 50 countries)
This Discover Magazine piece about the cultural evolution of music (featuring our articles in Current Biology and Evolution and Human Behavior)
This New York Times piece and Radio New Zealand interview about the Global Jukebox, where you can freely listen to over 5,000 annotated songs from around 1,000 societies around the world and compare them with linguistic, genetic, and other kinds of cross-cultural data (as we have done in Nature Communications and elsewhere).
This Radio New Zealand interview about applying music science to copyright disputes (featuring our paper published in Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval).
Our MUTEK keynote lecture/concert "Hearing Music Evolve", which includes our live performances of traditional Japanese, Ainu, and Amami Island music that are then remixed with samples from music around the world (The HU, Sonah Jobarteh, Baka Gbiné, Timbaland, and Queen)

Note: We are currently unable to accept new graduate students to the lab other than in exceptional circumstances until October 2028 (when our director, Patrick Savage, returns to his full-time position at Keio University after his 5-year Rutherford Discovery Fellowship at the University of Auckland / Waipapa Taumata Rau).

If you are still interested in applying to join the lab, please email our director, Patrick Savage, including a CV, academic transcript, and short (<500-word) description of your research interests and how they fit with the lab. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds – especially from historically underrepresented groups. Please read through our lab manual to get a sense of what life in our lab is like and what our expectations are for potential lab members, funding options, etc.

For more about who we are and what we do, please see our "Members" and "Publications" pages.