With the aid of the William Georgetti and Herbert Sutcliffe scholarships he completed a master's degree at Victoria University of Wellington, where he graduated in 1993.
In 1994 he was the Composer in Residence at the Nelson School of Music before moving to Britain where he completed a D Phil at the University of Sussex under Michael Finnissy, he has also studied with John Young, and Jonathan Harvey.
[citation needed] In 2004 he was awarded a place in the 'Visiting Arts' exchange programme with Taiwan[1] where he developed his interests in Chinese and Taiwanese music and aesthetics.
Speak's work can not be easily positioned in the standard European tradition, perhaps a legacy of his New Zealand roots and the influence of his interests in Chinese culture, his style is balanced between the ephemeral and the rigorous, characterised, in his own words, by “polemical internal musical debate, self contradictory behaviour, the simultaneous presentation of 'truth' with 'deceit', a continuous unification of opposites”.
[6] This dichotomy is reflected in his work 'Epeisodos', for solo E flat clarinet (1998), which, while rigorous in terms of its various systems of note and register generation, is also partly a transcription of an electroencephalograph of a patient suffering an epileptic seizure,[7] and his piano trio 'Lingua e Realidade' (2007) which explores the Brazilian Vilem Flusser's ideas relating to the function and nature of language, and its focus on the pre-conceptual state just prior to symbolisation.