Towards a Vocal and Acoustic Description of Kapa Haka

The purpose of this study is to analyze the voice used in kapa haka, a contemporary indigenous vocal performance from New Zealand, which includes the well-known haka. This is the first study of its kind and is a preliminary investigation into the vocal and acoustic description of kapa haka. A significant goal of this study is to contribute ideas and potential definitions of vocal qualities to the community of kapa haka trainers that were specific to the genre. This strengths-based project raises up these vocal practices as legitimate and authentic colors within a vocal tradition that has seen generational learning disrupted by colonial interventions and is now flourishing within the community.

Eight kapa haka performers (three females, five males) were involved in the study, they were all experienced performers; furthermore, two had formal classical voice training. They were individually recorded speaking and performing three different genres of kapa haka (mōteatea, waiata, and haka); all recordings were in te reo Māori (the Māori language). In addition, electroglottograph (EGG) signals were collected. An auditory-perceptual evaluation of the kapa haka voice was completed by three singer-researcher-pedagogues familiar with Western and non-western genres of singing. They all have experience appropriately collecting and analyzing data from indigenous communities, and they all understand the sociopolitical context of the vocal genre within the local colonial history. A specific evaluation instrument was created, and the results were validated. The acoustic and time-aligned EGG data was annotated at the phoneme level, and the signal analysis was performed in MATLAB. Averaged EGG pulses from /a/ segments were investigated, along with long-term average spectrums of the performances obtained from both the audio signal and the EGG signals.

The perceptual analysis suggests the biggest difference in vocal styles was between the haka and the other two genres (and speech). The acoustic and EGG results support these findings.

Common characteristics, perceptually and acoustically, were identified in the kapa haka performance styles across the eight performers.