African Talking Drums and Oral Noetics

Abstract

erable interest to anthropologists, linguists, and others, for on these instruments Africans have produced probably the most highly developed acoustic speech surrogates known around the world.' Various cultures have developed acoustic surrogates or sound substitutes for ordinary spoken words, using gongs or drums or whistles or bells or other instruments, as well as special sounds produced by the human voice itself, to communicate verbalized messages, often at a distance greater than that which articulate speech itself can cover. (Writing systems or scripts are also speech surrogates, but visual rather than acoustic, and we are concerned only with acoustic surrogates here.) Sometimes an acoustic speech surrogate is a code, that is to say, a system of sounds which essentially have no similarity to the sounds of the speech they represent: the Morse code used on an old-style telegraph is a standard example here, for the clicking buzz of a telegraph does not sound at all like speech and is not intended to. An African drum language is not such an abstract signaling code, but rather a way of reproducing, in a specially styled form, the sounds of the words of a given spoken language. Only recently have knowledgeable descriptions of various drum languages been worked out, and our knowledge of most such languages is still somewhat defective. To arrive at an understanding of how drums operate, one must first have a command in depth of the normal spoken language which the drums adapt, and then discover the principles governing the adaptation. That is to say, to understand African drum talk, one must know the spoken language being used-for one drummer will drum his native Duala, another Yaounde, another Lokele-and, in addition, one must discover the way in which the language is adapted or styled for the drums. A drum language is not understood ipso facto when one knows the spoken language it reproduces: drum language has to be specially learned even when the drums speak one's own mother tongue. To the not inconsiderable literature about the drums, much of it highly technical, there has just been added an invaluable small book (121 pages) in French, partly a translation but also an updating and magisterial streamlining of an earlier book in English by the same author.2 Although it honors existing linguistic, anthropological, musicological, and other scientific work, this new book is not in itself highly technical. But its author, Dr. John F.

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