Talking Drum

Back in 1999 I visited Nigeria, West Africa. One of the many souvenirs I picked up was a talking drum. This is an hourglass-shaped drum known as a Dundun or Gangan by the Yoruba people. Squeezing the leather cords, that connect the two drumheads, can change the pitch of the drum. This enables the instrument to mimic the tone and prosody of human speech. The pitch can be changed during a single beat, producing a warbling note. Volume, and rhythm can be captured, however not the qualities of vowels or consonants.

Originally, the instrument was used to communicate between villages up to 5 miles apart. Like Chinese languages, many African languages are tonal, and so the drum is able to represent the tones of the syllables of conventional phrases. But how are complex messages sent without the use of vowels or consonants? An English emigrant to Africa, John F. Carrington, in his 1949 book The Talking Drums of Africa explains:

“Using low tones referred to as male and higher female tones, the drummer communicates through the phrases and pauses, which can travel upwards of 4–5 miles. This process may take eight times longer than communicating a normal sentence but was effective for telling neighbouring villages of possible attacks or ceremonies.”

Example:

The message “Come back home” might be translated by the drummers as:

Make your feet come back the way they went, make your legs come back the way they went, plant your feet and your legs below, in the village which belongs to us

The extra phrases provide a context in which to make sense of the basic message or drum beats.

Ayan Bisi Adeleke playing the Talking Drum

The Talking Drum in contemporary music:

The talking drum has appeared in many different forms of modern or popular music including the music of Fleetwood Mac, Erykah Badu, Tom Waits, the Grateful Dead, Nana Vasconcelos and Peter Gabriel.

Black Panther

Ludwig Göransson, the Swedish-born composer who was charged with scoring Marvel’s “Black Panther” movie spent a month in Africa. The result was life-changing, he tells Variety: “I came back with a totally different idea of music, a different knowledge. The music that I discovered was so unique and special.” Nearly all of the unusual sounds in the “Black Panther” score were recorded in the West Africa.

The music that pairs with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), monarch of the film’s fictional African kingdom Wakanda, is led by six “talking drums,” which Göransson explains as “a small drum you put on your shoulder, one that does what no other percussion instrument does — it breathes.” The drummer squeezes, then loosens it to change the pitch. More here