Higher Pitch, Slower Tempo, and Greater Stability in Singing than in Conversation among Mandarin speakers in Auckland: A Registered Report Replicating Ozaki et al. (2024)

Cross-cultural research led by Ozaki et al. (2024) has revealed that songs exhibit higher pitch, lower tempo, and more stable pitches than speech. However, this research relied on solo recordings, while most singing and speaking occurs in group contexts. The present study examined the acoustic features of speech and songs among Mandarin speakers in group settings. We addressed two questions: 1 [confirmatory]) Do singing and conversation in group contexts show similar acoustic patterns to those reported by Ozaki et al. (2024)? 2 [exploratory]) Does musicianship influence the acoustic differences between speech and song? Three groups of native Mandarin speakers (n = 20) in Auckland participated in the singing and conversation tasks (both of which involved taking turns alternating singing/speaking). We analyzed three acoustic features (pitch height, temporal rate, pitch stability) to test the confirmatory question and examined correlations between musicianship and effect sizes for the exploratory question. Our confirmatory analyses replicated and extended the findings of Ozaki et al. (2024), showing that singing exhibited significantly higher pitch (D = 1.21), slower tempo (D = 2.07), and more stable pitch (D = 0.57) than conversation among Mandarin speakers. Exploratory results suggested a trend whereby individuals with higher musicianship tended to produce greater acoustic differentiation between speech and song; additional data are needed to confirm this effect. In future work, our team will integrate data from up to 26 languages/sites included in the Stage 1 Programmatic Registered Report protocol and conduct meta-analyses to provide more comprehensive estimates of cross-cultural relationships between speech and song.