Rhythm-Speech Correlations in a Corpus of Senegalese Drum Language

Sofiya Ros

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.643683

Abstract

In some African cultures, drumming is used for expressing linguistic meanings. Our research focuses on Senegalese musical traditions of encoding linguistic messages on the sabar drums. Senegalese drummers have the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. We consider rhythms and their linguistic correlates as being part of a Sabar drum language. The long-term goal of this investigation is to establish the linguistic properties of the Sabar drum language. To this end, this work relies on two kinds of research materials collected from Senegalese drummers: bàkks (classical sabar phrases, not improvised on the spot) and sabar improvisations including their translation to Wolof. We study the regularities between Wolof units and sabar rhythms in the collected data. We tested the hypothesis of a syllable-level correspondence between Sabar and Wolof, assuming that each sabar stroke represents a syllable or a number of syllables in Wolof, where the nature of the correspondence depends on the phonetic or phonological properties of a vowel in a syllable. The analysis has shown that different drum strokes are more commonly associated with different types of vowels (front, central or back; open, mid-open/mid-closed or closed vowels).

Highlights

Speech surrogates using drums are present in Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania (Stern, 1957; Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, 1976)
Our research focuses on Senegalese traditions of encoding linguistic messages on drums
Nowadays the sabar drums are rarely used as a speech surrogate and their main function is to entertain the listener rather than to convey a linguistic message, the practice of playing the sabar still maintains a close connection to linguistic expressions (Winter, 2014)

Summary

Introduction

Speech surrogates using drums are present in Africa, South America, Asia and Oceania (Stern, 1957; Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, 1976). These are emulated speech systems, which are obtained by transforming spoken language into drum sounds (Seifart et al, 2018). Senegalese drummers follow the practice of playing drums in correlation to speech. Nowadays the sabar drums are rarely used as a speech surrogate and their main function is to entertain the listener rather than to convey a linguistic message, the practice of playing the sabar still maintains a close connection to linguistic expressions (Winter, 2014). Unlike most other languages of Correlations in a Senegalese Drum Language

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Conclusion