The Language of Gángan, A Yorùbá Talking Drum

Samuel Kayode Akinbo

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.650382

Abstract

It is widely known that Yorùbá drummers communicate through their native drums. This paper investigates the grammar of gángan, which belongs to a family of Yoruba drums called dùndún. The results of this study show that Yorùbá drummers represent the phonetic realisation of lexical and grammatical tones of their language with the drum. Statistically, the speech tones and the acoustic correlate of the corresponding drum representations have a significant positive relationship. In both spoken and drum communication, vowel (V) and consonant-vowel (CV) prosodic units have different statuses. To conclude, Yorùbá drummers communicate via the gángan drum by transposing certain phonemic features and maybe phonological conditions of their language to musical forms.

Highlights

Cultures around the world communicate through musical instruments by transposing linguistic features to music melodies (e.g., Bradley, 1979 on the Sino-Tibetan gourd organ, Poss, 2005; Poss, 2012 on Hmong raj in Southeast Asia, Kaminski, 2008 on Asante ivory trumpet in Ghana, Winter, 2014 on the Sabar of Senegalese, McPherson, 2018 on the balafon of the Sambla people in Burkina Faso, Seifart et al, 2018 on Amazon Bora)
This study shows that Yorùbá drummers represent lexical tones, grammatical tones and the phonetic realisation of these tones with a talking drum
Comparing the pitch contours of the speech tones to those of the corresponding drum tones shows that there is a significantly strong positive relationship between the speech tones and the corresponding drum tones

Summary

Introduction

Cultures around the world communicate through musical instruments by transposing linguistic features to music melodies (e.g., Bradley, 1979 on the Sino-Tibetan gourd organ, Poss, 2005; Poss, 2012 on Hmong raj in Southeast Asia, Kaminski, 2008 on Asante ivory trumpet in Ghana, Winter, 2014 on the Sabar of Senegalese, McPherson, 2018 on the balafon of the Sambla people in Burkina Faso, Seifart et al, 2018 on Amazon Bora). To understand what is encoded with a talking drum, it is imperative to understand certain aspects of the sound patterns of the source language used for the drum communication For this reason, this section presents a description of the relevant sound patterns in Standard Yorùbá, which is the focus of this work. Following the account in (Orie, 2000), only a vowel with an onset consonant (CV) can project a syllable in Standard Yorùbá. In this account, a V unit constitutes a mora, not a syllable

Methods

Results

Conclusion