Every rave you have ever been to runs on the same basic trick. Move air, make it vibrate, point it at a room full of people and see what happens to them. We have got very good at doing this with speakers and subwoofers. Long before any of that, the same job was being done here with bone, wood, stone and dried gourds, and the instruments that did it are still being played today.
Taonga pūoro are the traditional musical instruments of Māori. The name is often translated as singing treasures, which tells you something about how they are regarded. They are not props and they are not folk curiosities. They are taonga/treasure, with names, whakapapa and a purpose attached to each one.
Instruments With Families
The thing that takes the longest to get your head around is that taonga pūoro are not organised the way a European orchestra is. They are grouped into whānau, families descended from the atua/gods who brought them into being.
Melodic instruments belong to the world of Ranginui, the sky father, because rangi is also the word for a tune, and melody drifts upwards. Rhythm comes from the heartbeat of Papatūānuku, the earth mother, so stones and the instruments that keep time sit in her family. The spinning wind instruments come from the realm of Tāwhirimātea, atua of the winds.
Individual instruments have their own atua too. Hine Raukatauri is the atua of flute music, and the pūtōrino is shaped after the cocoon of the case moth, her physical form. Hine Pū te Hue, another daughter of Tāne, is the atua of gourd instruments, and the story goes that her calming song brought peace to the war between Tāne and his brothers.
Each instrument is made slightly differently from the last so that, like a person, it has its own voice. Many are given personal names. This is the part that makes the whole tradition click into place once you hear it: these are not tools for producing notes, they are individuals you are having a conversation with.
Bone, Wood, Shell And Gourd: Meet The Whānau
There are dozens. Here are the ones you are most likely to hear.
Pūtōrino. The one that looks like a long wooden cocoon, split, hollowed and bound back together. It has three voices depending on how it is played and held, usually described as the female voice, the male voice and the voice of the children. No other instrument in the world works quite like it.
Kōauau. The most common of all the flutes, short and cross-blown, traditionally made from wood, albatross wing bone or plant stems. Small enough to wear around your neck. Used for everything from healing to charming a sweetheart to making people laugh.
Pūrerehua/Turorohu. A shaped blade on a cord, spun above the head. It produces a low pulsing roar that you feel more than hear. There are accounts of pūrerehua being used to call rain and to summon tears.
Porotiti. A disc spun on a twisted cord between the hands, from the realm of the winds. Simple mechanics, surprisingly huge sound, and used in healing practice where the vibration is held close to the body.
Pūtātara. The conch trumpet, usually a triton shell with a carved wooden mouthpiece. In one of the oldest accounts, two pūtātara were sounded to announce Tāne’s return from the heavens with the baskets of knowledge. The pūtātara joins the conch shell of Tangaroa with wood from Tāne Mahuta, bringing the families of these atua together in peace.
Pūkāea. A wooden trumpet, historically up to two and a half metres long, made by splitting a length of mataī, hollowing each half and binding the two back together. It was traditionally a war trumpet, sounded by watchmen to signal the approach of an enemy, and it still commands a room. Whenever one is played, everyone in earshot stops and turns around.
Hue Puruhau. Gourds, used at every scale. Tiny ones are played with the nose. Medium ones become poi āwhiowhio, whistling gourds swung on a cord to imitate birds. The largest have their tops cut off and are blown across to produce a deep boom close to the call of a kākāpō.
One more who is worth knowing about even though you will rarely hear her: is pūmotomoto, a long notched flute traditionally played over the fontanelle of a newborn, so the songs and knowledge of the child’s iwi went in before the skull closed. Sound as a delivery system for identity. That is a very old idea and a very beautiful one.
They Went Quiet For Over A Century
This is the part of the story that catches people out. For a long stretch, most of these instruments were not played at all.
Missionary contact, illness, land loss and the suppression of Māori cultural Missionary contact, illness, land loss and the suppression of Māori cultural practice pushed the playing traditions to the margins, and much of the knowledge of how the instruments worked went with them. Many ended up behind glass in museums, in some cases catalogued wrongly, with flutes recorded as cloak toggles. Others went into private collections overseas or were destroyed outright.
The revival is recent enough to sit within living memory. In 1985, Ngā Puna Waihanga, the Māori Artists and Writers Organisation, whose name means ‘the wellspring of creativity’, held its annual hui at Rātana Pā near Whanganui. One workshop drew particular attention: making and playing kōauau, convened by the late Ivan Ehau with Joe Malcolm as kaumātua. Also there was kaumātua Mauri Tirikātene of Ngāi Tahu. As a boy in the Whanganui area, his grandfather had taken him into the bush to play the pūtōrino and expected him to copy what he heard. Now he could pass that knowledge on. The thread had worn very thin, but it had never quite snapped.
The partnership at the heart of the revival grew out of the same organisation. At a Ngā Puna Waihanga hui at Te Araroa on the East Coast, Richard Nunns and Brian Flintoff, who already knew each other, began working with Hirini Melbourne. Hirini, of Ngāi Tūhoe and Ngāti Kahungunu, was a composer, linguist and academic. Richard was a teacher and jazz musician whose trumpet embouchure turned out to be exactly what these instruments needed. Brian, a carver now based in Nelson, could turn oral descriptions and museum photographs into working instruments.
Between them they spent years on marae, in museums and at workshops, playing instruments that had been silent for over a hundred years and asking kaumātua what they remembered. Their 1994 recording, Te Kū Te Whē, is the one most people point to as the moment the sound came back into public earshot. That work carries on now through the Haumanu Collective and a generation of practitioners including Horomona Horo, Alistair Fraser, Jerome Kavanagh, James Webster and many others.
Where It Meets Electronic Music
Here is the part that should interest anyone who has had a kanikani (dance) in front of a rig.
Taonga pūoro are built to do things that synthesis is still chasing. Long sustained drones with a rough breathy edge. Pitch that bends inside a single note. Rhythmic pulses from a spinning object that phase in and out as the spin speeds up and slows down. Overtones stacked inside one voice. If you have ever spent an evening trying to make a pad breathe, you already know why these instruments appeal to producers.
The crossover is well established, and Paddy Free of Pitch Black is the name we’ll start with here. Back in 1996 he was a founding member of Mesh, alongside Brother J, who wove organic sounds into digital soundscapes, and drummer James Pinker. Pinker had come up through Auckland’s late 1970s punk and post-punk scene with the Superettes and The Features, then played with the industrial band SPK, touring the United States with them, before returning to Aotearoa.
MESH brought traditional Pacific instruments onto the dancefloor as ‘live organic techno’. In 2008, Paddy’s debut solo album, Karekare: Te Reo O Te Whenua, paired his electronics with Richard Nunns on taonga pūoro and vocals in te reo Māori from Tiki Taane and Waimihi Hotere. Two years later Free formed the group Reo with taonga pūoro players Horomona Horo, Alistair Fraser and James Webster alongside vocalists Erina Daniels and Charles Royal, building ambient work out of the instruments, mōteatea-style chanting and digital textures. Free, Fraser and Nunns also wrote a 23-minute piece for taonga pūoro and electronica for the Orokonui Ecosanctuary.
Rob Thorne has taken the instruments into free noise and beat-driven territory, and Horomona Horo teamed up with London dub producer Alpha Steppa on Ipurangi, a 15-minute journey through a Māori creation story built entirely from taonga pūoro and deep dub. The Haumanu Collective’s He Kete Pūoro Volume 1 pairs practitioners with contemporary musicians and producers across a full record. Further back, the instruments carried a lot of the emotional weight in the soundtracks to Once Were Warriors and Whale Rider.
If our piece on 432 Hz and solfeggio tuning interests you, this is the same territory approached from a completely different direction. The healing use of taonga pūoro is not a modern wellness add-on. Porotiti and pūrerehua have been used that way for a very long time, and the practice is being actively revived right now through wānanga on rongoā and sound.
Whakarongo Mai, Whakarongo Atu
Listen first. Te Kū Te Whē, Alistair Fraser’s Toitū Te Pūoro, Rob Thorne’s work and He Kete Pūoro Volume 1 will give you a solid picture of the range in a couple of evenings. If you want to hear it next to a bassline, start with Paddy Free’s Karekare and Horomona Horo and Alpha Steppa’s Ipurangi.
If you want to go past listening, go to a wānanga rather than a shop. This is not gatekeeping. It is how the knowledge survived in the first place. These instruments nearly disappeared once, and they came back because people like Mauri Tirikātene sat with others and passed on what they had been taught, face to face. A wānanga carries that on. You learn the karakia and the stories alongside the technique, you often make your own instrument, and you learn its whakapapa, which is the difference between owning an object and having a relationship with a taonga.
These instruments come with tikanga attached, and the people carrying that knowledge have been generous with it for forty years on the understanding that it is treated properly. Sampling a pūtōrino into your DAW because it sounds cool is the wrong end of the stick. Learning who Hine Raukatauri is first, and going through the people who hold that knowledge, is the right one. Do it that way and you are not just borrowing a sound. You become part of the reason it keeps going.
Ake, ake, ake!
More To Explore
Wānanga
Te Wānanga o Raukawa (Ōtaki). Founded in 1981, it was the first contemporary wānanga in Aotearoa. It offers whakairo, weaving and Whare Tapere (performing arts), and half of each of these qualifications is the art specialisation, with the other half split between te reo Māori and iwi and hapū studies. Te Wānanga o Raukawa
Te Wānanga o Aotearoa (nationwide). Its toi programmes cover visual arts, weaving, whakairo, mau rākau and Māori performing arts, up to Maunga Kura Toi, a Bachelor of Māori Art degree. Te Wānanga o Aotearoa
Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi (Whakatāne, plus Auckland and Whangārei). It offers a Bachelor of Visual Culture and a Bachelor of Māori Performing Arts covering kapa haka, mōteatea, waiata, haka and Māori theatre. Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi
Film
Te Āio Productions (Whanganui). An audio and video production company in Whanganui offering documentary making, television production, music videos and corporate video, plus location audio, radio imaging, post-production audio and music production. It’s run by Sacha Te Utupoto Keating, who has a lifetime of experience in media, and works as director of photography and sound recordist. Te Āio Productions
Christina Asher CNA Casting (Auckland) is a New Zealand casting director whose work has helped bring Māori, Pacific and Indigenous stories to the screen. Through CNA Casting she has cast feature films including Whina, MURU and White Lies, New Zealand’s Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film. Her credits also include the Indigenous anthology films We Are Still Here and VAI and the bilingual series Ahikāroa. CNA Casting
Māoriland Hub and Film Festival (Ōtaki). The Hub is a centre of excellence for Māori film and creative arts, and the festival is the world’s largest Indigenous film festival. Beyond the festival, Māoriland runs events, exhibitions and year-round education programmes that build youth creativity and support Māori screen practitioners. Maoriland Hub And Film Festival
Galleries
Toi Māori Gallery (Wellington). Run by Toi Māori Aotearoa, it opened in 2018 to give Māori artists exhibition opportunities in central Wellington and through the Toi Māori Aotearoa digital network. The parent organisation is an independent Māori arts organisation that looks after the interests of Māori art and artists for the benefit of Māori people. Toi Māori Gallery
Toi Matarau ki Kāpiti (Ōtaki). This Toi Iho–endorsed gallery was set up to support descendants of Ngāti Raukawa, Te Ātiawa and Ngāti Toarangatira, and also welcomes artists from the Pacific and Turtle Island. Toi Matarau ki Kāpiti
Wairau Māori Art Gallery (Te Taitokerau). It shows senior and emerging Māori artists. A recent example was Toka Tū, an exhibition of nine senior Māori artists whose work blends deep Te Ao Māori visual traditions with contemporary mediums and issues. Wairau Māori Art Gallery
Music
Waiata Māori Music Awards (Hastings). For 19 years these awards have recognised Māori artists, composers, performers and producers whose work strengthens te reo Māori. The 2026 ceremony was on 25 September at the Toi Toi HB Arts & Events Centre. Waiata Māori Music Awards
Te Māngai Pāho. This is the main funder for reo Māori music and screen. It is a Māori language agency in the broadcast sector whose purpose is to promote Māori language and culture. Its Waiata Reo Māori fund supports single songs with more than 50% te reo Māori, and it co-funds scripted productions with strong te reo and te ao Māori themes with NZ On Air. Te Māngai Pāho
Studios and schools
Te Puia / NZ Māori Arts and Crafts Institute (Rotorua). It is home to the national schools of carving and weaving, where visitors can watch master carvers, weavers and their students and join workshops. The wood carving programme runs for three years and takes up to five students of Māori descent each year. Te Puia Maori Arts And Crafts Institute