The Talking Drum

 

The talking drum is an hourglass-shaped drum from West Africa, whose pitch can be regulated to mimic the tone and prosody of human speech. It has two drumheads connected by leather tension cords, which allow the player to modulate the pitch of the drum by squeezing the cords between their arm and body.  A skilled player is able to play whole phrases.  Most talking drums sound like a human humming, depending on the way you play.

 

Hourglass-shaped talking drums are some of the oldest instruments used by West African griots and their history can be traced back to the Yoruba people.  The Yoruba people of south western Nigeria and Benin have developed a highly sophisticated genre of griot music centering on the talking drum.

 

 

The pitch o the drum is varied to mimic the tone patterns of speech. This is done by varying the tension placed on the drumhead:  the opposing drum heads are connected by a common tension cord.  The waist of the drum is held between the player’s arm and ribs, so that when squeezed, the drumhead is tightened, producing a higher not than when it’s in its relaxed state; the pitch can be changed during a single beat, producing a warbling note.  The drum can thus capture the pitch, volume, and the rhythm of human speech, though not the qualities of vowels or consonants.  The use of talking drums as a form of communication was noticed by Europeans in the first half of the eighteenth century.  Detailed messages could be sent from one village to the next faster than could be carried by a person riding a horse.

 

 

The message “Come back home” might be translated by the drummers as: “Make your feet comeback 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”.

 

Single words would be translated into phrases. For example, “moon” would be played as “the Moon looks towards Earth”, and “war” as “war which causes attention to ambushes”.

 

 

 

                                                                                                                        Winston A. Ajakaye