Study of drum language as a communication system in African societies

本研究旨在分析乐器声音传递言语信息的机制。材料是布基纳法索（西非）莫西人使用的鼓语。在一些仪式场合，宫廷鼓手的首领通过敲打本德雷来“背诵”皇家家谱：鼓的语言被逐句翻译成莫西语（摩尔语），由另一名鼓手大声重复。我们通过计算机辅助的声谱分析来研究所有短语的材料。本文的主要目的是：（1）弄清鼓音与口语的超音段特征（以及某些音段特征）之间的对应关系;（2）了解在言语信息转化为鼓信息的过程中，在何种情况下会出现删节或冗余;（3）确定莫西鼓语的习语特征。鼓声和言语信息中某些音段特征之间的对应关系，因为它们是由区别性特征的二元对立定义的（雅各布森等人），2）在语言信息的缩短程度与同一公式信息的重复性或被引国王的皇家家谱中的早期性之间没有发现任何规律性的相关性。3）在超音段特征中，我们只处理了高/低音调的对立，尽管另外两个方面也很重要，压力和持续时间然而，无论是通过声谱分析，还是通过与莫西鼓手对某些短语的显著修改记录的可辨认性进行实验，我们都可以发现鼓语的一些惯用特征。

This study aims at analyzing the mechanism to transfer verbal messages by means of instrumental sounds. The material is the drum language used among the Mosi of Burkina Faso (West Africa). On several ceremonial occasion, the chief of court drummers "recite" the royal genealogy, by beating bendre : the drum language is interpreted, phrase by phrase, into Mosi Language (moore) to be repeated in a loud voice by another drummer.We studied the material by computer-assisted sound-spectrographic analysis of all phrases. The main objective points are :1) To make clear the correspondence between the drum sounds and suprasegmental features (as well as certain segmental features) of the spoken language.2) To know how and under what circumstances abridgment or redundancy occurs in transforming the verbal message into the drum message.3) To determine the idiomatic characteristics of the Mosi drum language.The results of the examination of these points are :1) The correspondence between drum sounds features and tonal features is observed with a high frequency, at least at the beginning and at the end of a phrase. The correspondence between drum sounds and certain segmental features in verbal message, as they are defined by binary opposition of distinctive features (Jakobson, et al.), such as acute/grave, tense/1ax, interrupted/continuant, could not be confirmed.2) Any regularity of the correlation could not be found between the degree of shortening of the verbal message and the repeatedness of the same formulary message, or the earliness in the royal genealogy of the cited king.3) Of suprasegmental features, we treated only high/low tonal opposition, in spite of the importance of two other aspects, the stress and the duration. However, we could find some idiomatic features of the drum language, either by the spectrographic analysis or by the experiments with the Mosi drummers on the discernibility of significantly modified records of some phrases.