A Flute, Musical Bows and Bamboo Clarinets that “Speak” in the Amazon Rainforest; Speech and Music in the Gavião Language of Rondônia

Abstract

The Gavião, a native Amazonian group in Rondônia, Brazil, use three different traditional musical instruments that they identify as “speaking” ones and that are characterized by a very tight music-lyric relation through similar pitch patterns: a flute (called kotiráp), a pair of mouth bows (iridináp), and three large bamboo clarinets (totoráp), played by three different players, each one playing a single-note clarinet. They show in different ways the relation of acoustic iconicity which exists between the words of the songs’ lyrics and the music played on such instruments to “sing” the songs. Linguistic analysis makes it possible to understand the phonetic and phonological nature of the iconicity. The sung speech form, being intermediate between the spoken and the instrumental forms, is useful for both learning and explaining the musical notes. In a language with distinctive tone and length, such as Gavião of Rondônia, the first question about speech that is played by musical instruments is the relation between the melodies and the supersegmental phonology of the corresponding words in sung speech and in modal spoken speech. It is influenced by the phonological possibilities of the spoken form and by the musical possibilities of the instrumental form. The description and analysis of Gavião instrumental speech and song practices are found to be a noteworthy contribution to the typology of instrumental language surrogates associated with a tone language, one that calls for a reexamination of hypotheses about which aspects of the phonological/phonetic structure can be transposed in instrumental speech and how this can be done. The role of this kind of instrumental sung speech is artistic and also practical as it contributes to maintain the oral heritage. Such practice represents a little-studied and threatened cultural heritage of the traditional substratum of the cultures of Amazonia.

Akan tone encoding across musical modalities

“…But in many communities in Africa and beyond, we find a secondary auditory modality: musical surrogate languages. In these systems, linguistic content is encoded in musical form, using instruments like membrane drums (Carrington 1949, Winter 2014, Akinbo 2019, slit-log drums (Seifart et al 2018), xylophones (Zemp and Soro 2010, McPherson 2019a, Struthers-Young 2021, flutes (Poss 2005, Carter-Ényì et al 2021, Moore and Meyer 2021, or jaw harps (Pugh-Kitingan 1982, Proschan 1994, Falk 2003, Blench and Campos 2010. Most-but not all-of these systems encode phonemic aspects of the languages on which they are based, and as such they can be a valuable tool for probing phonological structure and musician's metalinguistic awareness of it (McPherson 2019b).…”

“…He argues that, since postlexical rules such as vowel elision or tone sandhi between words are uniformly encoded in speech surrogates but intonational effects are not, the conversion of spoken language to surrogate phonology must take place at a level after postlexical rules but before "postsyntactic" rules like downstep/downdrift and ultimately phonetic implementation. However, more recent work on musical surrogate languages, including Akinbo (2019) on the Yorùbá tension drum, Struthers-Young (2022) on the Northern Toussian balafon, Meyer and Moore (2021) on Gavião wind instruments, and McPherson (2022) on the Igbo ọ ̀jà flute show that these intonational elements, especially downstep and downdrift, are in fact encoded in some instrumental surrogates. The question, then, is whether deeper study of Akan surrogates will reveal any of these intonational effects, and if not, what makes its surrogate systems different from those that do.…”