Talking balafons

Zemp, Hugo; Soro, Sikaman

doi:10.21504/amj.v8i4.1864

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Balafon playing is a hereditary profession, passed from father to son in just a small number of families belonging to the griot caste. Unlike some balafon traditions, such as the Senufo balafon orchestras (Zemp and Soro 2010), Sambla balafon music involves just a single instrument at any event. However, three people play at the same time: a simple middle part sets the tempo, while a more complicated bass part creates a layered polyrhythmic backdrop to the "soloist" on the treble.…”

Section: Sambla Balafonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding

McPherson

2021

Front. Commun.

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This paper analyzes the musical surrogate encoding of Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso) syllable structure on the balafon, a resonator xylophone used by the Sambla ethnicity. The elements of syllable structure that are encoded include vowel length, sesquisyllabicity, diphthongs, and nasal codas. Certain elements, like vowel length and sesquisyllabicity, involve categorical encoding through conscious rules of surrogate speech, while others, like diphthongs and nasal codas, vary between being treated as simple or complex. Beyond these categorical encodings, subtler aspects of rhythmic structure find their way into the speech surrogate through durational differences; these include duration differences from phonemic distinctions like vowel length in addition to subphonemic differences due to phrasal position. I argue that these subconscious durational differences arise from a “phonetic filter”, which mediates between the musician’s inner voice and their non-verbal behavior. Specifically, syllables encoded on the balafon may be timed according to the perceptual center (p-center) of natural spoken rhythm, pointing to a degree of phonetic detail in a musician’s inner speech.

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Section: Sambla Balafonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding

McPherson

2021

Front. Commun.

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“…In this study, we used an instrument capable of speech surrogacy to explore the boundaries between speech and music. While several instruments such as trumpets ( Kaminski, 2008 ), flutes ( Moore and Meyer, 2014 ), xylophones ( Strand, 2009 ; Zemp and Soro, 2010 ; McPherson, 2018 ), and whistling ( Stern, 1957 ) can produce speech surrogates, we focussed here on the dùndún talking drum to examine listeners’ perception of music and speech and, more specifically, the role of acoustic features in distinguishing these two categories. To do so, we recorded expert dùndún performances, which have the advantage of being able to create both musical and speech-like stimuli without requiring the human voice (highly familiar to all listeners).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perception of Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum Performances as Speech-Like vs. Music-Like: The Role of Familiarity and Acoustic Cues

et al. 2021

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It seems trivial to identify sound sequences as music or speech, particularly when the sequences come from different sound sources, such as an orchestra and a human voice. Can we also easily distinguish these categories when the sequence comes from the same sound source? On the basis of which acoustic features? We investigated these questions by examining listeners’ classification of sound sequences performed by an instrument intertwining both speech and music: the dùndún talking drum. The dùndún is commonly used in south-west Nigeria as a musical instrument but is also perfectly fit for linguistic usage in what has been described as speech surrogates in Africa. One hundred seven participants from diverse geographical locations (15 different mother tongues represented) took part in an online experiment. Fifty-one participants reported being familiar with the dùndún talking drum, 55% of those being speakers of Yorùbá. During the experiment, participants listened to 30 dùndún samples of about 7s long, performed either as music or Yorùbá speech surrogate (n = 15 each) by a professional musician, and were asked to classify each sample as music or speech-like. The classification task revealed the ability of the listeners to identify the samples as intended by the performer, particularly when they were familiar with the dùndún, though even unfamiliar participants performed above chance. A logistic regression predicting participants’ classification of the samples from several acoustic features confirmed the perceptual relevance of intensity, pitch, timbre, and timing measures and their interaction with listener familiarity. In all, this study provides empirical evidence supporting the discriminating role of acoustic features and the modulatory role of familiarity in teasing apart speech and music.

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“…Like natural language phonology, there is no one-to-one mapping between tonemic categories and notes on the balafon; tone continues to be relative and dependent upon the mode of the song being played. Nevertheless, there is a default mode when playing phrases outside of the context of a song, and here there are strong tendencies for tone-note mappings, summarized in (4). The top row shows an octave of the balafon scale and beneath it where each tone most commonly occurs:…”

Section: Tone Encodingmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Asante, [3]), and, most pertinent to the current paper, xylophones (e.g. Senoufo, [4]). Whistling languages ([1] [5]) are also common as speech surrogates, in both tonal and non-tonal languages.…”

Section: Musical Surrogate Languagesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical surrogate languages in the documentation of complex tone: the case of the Sambla balafon

McPherson¹

2018

6th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (TAL 2018)

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In documenting an undescribed language, tone can pose a significant challenge. In practically no other aspect of the phonology can such a small set of categories show such an overlapping range of pronunciation, especially in level-tone languages where f0 slope offers fewer clues to category. This paper demonstrates the unexpected tool offered by musical surrogate languages in the documentation of these tone systems. It draws on the case study of the Sambla balafon, a resonator xylophone played by many ethnicities in Burkina Faso and neighboring West African countries. The language of the Sambla people, Seenku (Northwestern Mande, Samogo), has a highly complex tonal system, whose four contrastive levels and multiple contour tones are encoded musically in the notes of the balafon, allowing musicians to communicate with each other and with spectators without ever opening their mouths. I show how the balafon data have shed light on a number of tonal contrasts and phenomena and raised questions about levels of the grammar and their mental representations.

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Talking balafons

Cited by 9 publications

References 2 publications

Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding

Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding

Perception of Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum Performances as Speech-Like vs. Music-Like: The Role of Familiarity and Acoustic Cues

Musical surrogate languages in the documentation of complex tone: the case of the Sambla balafon

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