Talking drum: Ghana musical instrument

The talking drum is an hourglass-shaped musical drum that is found in the West Africa. The pitch of the musical drum can be regulated to mimic the voice or tone and prosody of human speech. The instrument has two drum heads that are connected by leather tension cord that permits the player of the instrument to modulate the pitch of the drum by squeezing the cords between his arm and his body. A skilled player of the instrument is always able to perform whole phrases. Analogous hourglass-shaped drum are found in Asia, although they are not used to emulate the speech of human, but the idakka is used to emulate the vocal music.

source of picture: www.anansevillage.com

Hourglass-shaped talking drums are some of the oldest musical instruments that were used by West African griots and their history can be traced back to the Yoruba people, the Ghana Empire and the Hausa people. The Yoruba people of the southwest Nigeria and Benin and the Dagomba of the northern Ghana have built a highly complex genre of griot music that centers on the musical instrument. Many versions of the talking drum are in use today with the same way of construction. Fascinatingly, this construction is limited within the modern day boarder of the West Africa, with the exception to this rule being the northern Cameroon and the western Chad areas that have shared populations belonging to principal groups in their bordering West African countries like the kanuri, the Djerma, the Fulani and the Hausa.

In the history of Senegal and Gambia, the tama was one of the musical instruments that were used in the tradition of the serer people. The tama drum has a serer religious connotation that predates the Ghana Empire.

The pitch of the drum is heterogeneous to mimic the tone style of human speech. This is done by differentiating the tension placed on the head of the drum: the opposing head of the drum are linked by a common tension cord. The waist of the musical instrument is held between the arm and the ribs of the player, so that when it is squeezed, the drum head will be tightened and this will produce a higher note than when the drum is in its relaxed form.; the pitch of the instrument can be changed during a single beat, manufacturing a trilling note. Thus, the drum can capture the pitch volume and rhythm of human speech, but not the qualities or consonants and vowels.

The use of the musical instrument as a means of communication was discovered by Europeans in the first half of the 18^th century. Detailed message can be sent to a particular village from one village faster than could be carried by a person riding a horse. In the 19^th century, Roger T. Clarke who is a missionary noticed that the signal signifies the tones of the syllables of conventional phrases of a traditional and highly poetic character. Just like the Chinese language, many African languages are also tonal; the pitch is essential in ascertaining the meaning of a particular word. The only problem was how to transmit complex messages without using vowels and consonants. Using the low tones means male and using the higher tones means the female tones, the player of the drum communicates through the phrases and pauses that can travel upward of about 4 to 5 miles. This process can take 8 times longer that communicating a normal sentence, although it was effectual for telling the neighboring villages about ceremonies and attacks.

There are many sizes of the talking drum, with the dimensions of the drums contradictory between ethnic groups, although all of them follow the same template. The tama of the serer, Wolof and the Mandinka is epitomized by the smaller dimension of the instrument with about 13 cm and the drum head having about 7 cm in diameter. This manufactures a much higher pitch tone than any other instrument of the same construction.

The Yoruba and degomba people on the other hand, possess some of the largest dimensions for the musical instrument in their lunna and dundun groups, having the length of the instrument being about 23 cm to 38 cm and the head of the drum being about 10 cm to 18 cm in diameter. In Yoruba, the ensemble of the talking drum is used together with the smaller versions of the musical instrument analogous to the tama known as ‘gangan’ in the Yoruba language.

The playing patterns are closely related with the construction of the drum and the timbre of each language. There is a clear variation in performing patterns between areas with predominantly Fulani and Mande speaking populations and traditionally non-Mande areas through east.

The main technique of playing the musical instrument in areas through west like the Senegal, Gambia, western Mali and guinea is known by rapid rolls and short bursts of sound between the stick holding hand and the accompanying free hand of the player, and correlates with the different pitch accent and non-tonal languages heard in the area. From the eastern Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana, towards Niger, western Chad and Nigeria, the playing pattern of the musical instrument is centered on manufacturing long sustained notes by hitting the head of the drum with the holding hand and accompanying free hand used to humidify and change tones just after hitting it. This manufactures a rubbery sounding texture to its playing that emulates the heavy and complex tones used languages from the area. This characteristic pattern of playing the musical instrument can be clearly heard in the popular music of this area, especially in the areas where the musical instrument is the lead instrument, like the Fuji music of the Yoruba people of Nigeria. 

In some ethnic groups, each individual was given a drum name, example from the among the Balu people of Cameroon are, ‘even if you dress up very well, love is just the only thing’ or ‘the giant wood rat has no child, the house rat has no child’. The players of the talking drums set messages by drumming the name of the recipient, followed by the name of the message sender.