The Ethiopian lyre Bagana. An ethno-acoustical study

Abstract

The Ethiopian lyre bagana is usually finger-plucked and monodic, with a skin soundboard and ten gut strings tuned to low-frequency pitches (ca 50-150 Hz). Its most important sonorous characteristic is its buzzing sounds, produced thanks to leather pieces placed between each string and the wide bridge. This study is based on a corpus of sounds produced by eight different instruments played by a virtuoso master and recorded in situ with and without the leather pieces. The sounds have been analyzed through calculation of several timbre descriptors based on time-domain, sinusoidal harmonic model and short-time Fourier transform representations. These results have been compared with ethnomusicological analyses of the repertoire and the socio-cultural aspects of the bagana, in order to understand how the sound qualities are dealt with by the players. These joint analyses show that the very distinctive buzzing quality of the bagana sounds can be linked with auditory roughness and inharmonicity descriptors (indicating that it is not due to noise but rather to quasi-harmonic components) while the significant timbre variation between sounds is mostly due to differences in string quality, location of the leather pieces on the bridge and musicians' need to produce the longest possible duration.