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African Talking Drums and Oral N oetics 4 The primary orality in which human thought and verbal expression is initially and fundamentally lodged undergoes other metamorphoses besides those which lead through writing and print to the electronic management of thought and expression. Most of these metamorphoses have not been studied in detail. What effect, for example, did the Morse code have on the way news is formulated by journalists? Or how did use of the semaphore alphabet curtail normal oral redundancies or otherwise affect the way marine and military directives were formulated? How did nonalphabetic signaling, such as the use of varicolored flags, each the equivalent of a particular word or phrase displayed in accord with an explicitly devised "grammar," affect thought and expression where such signaling was operative? What did the sign language of the American Plains Indians do to their normal oral verbalization? How did its effects on verbalization compare with those of various sign languages for the deaf? Many other metamorphoses of primary orality could be enumerated, but in virtually every case, except for that of sign languages for the deaf, little or nothing is known of their effects on noetic processes. The talking drums of Subsaharan Africa metamorphose primary oral processes in ways which are unique, at least in their sophistication and cultural importance. The last word has certainly not been said about all the ways the drum languages function in the hundreds of different cultures across the lower half African Talking Drums 93 of Africa-a vast area, since Africa is a continent some four times the size of the pre-Alaskan United States. But we do know enough to be able to compare some typical features of drum talk at least in certain African cultures with some of the features of primary oral verbalization. The present study undertakes such a comparison, in a limited, preliminary fashion. The comparison would appear to throw light not only upon the drumming processes but also upon the primary oral processes themselves out of which the drum languages have been developed. I For some time African talking drums or slit-gongs have been of considerable interest to anthropologists, linguists, and others, for on these instruments Africans have produced probably the most highly developed acoustic speech surrogates known anywhere in the world.1 Various cultures have developed acoustic surrogates or sound substitutes for ordinary spoken words, using gongs or drums or whistles or bells or other instruments, as well as special sounds produced by the human voice itself, to communicate verbalized messages, often at a distance greater than that which articulate speech itself can cover. (Writing systems or scripts are also speech surrogates, but visual rather than acoustic, and we are concerned only with acoustic surrogates here.) Sometimes an acoustic speech surrogate is a code, that is to say, a system of sounds which essentially have no similarity to the sounds of the speech they represent: the Morse code used on an old-style telegraph is a standard example here, for the clicking buzz of a telegraph does not sound at all like speech and is not 1. In "Drum and Whistle 'Languages': An Analysis of Speech Surrogates," American Anthropologist, 59 (1957),487-506, Theodore Stern has provided a permanently helpful generalized analysis of various ways in which human speech has been converted into surrogate sounds for transmission by means other than normal vocal articulation of speech itself. The article provides an extensive bibliography on drum languages. For an example of a recent technical linguistic study of drum language, see Pierre Alexandre, "Langages tambourines," Semiotica, 1 (1969), 273-281. See also Thomas A. Sebeok and Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), Speech Surrogates, Vol. I (The Hague: Mouton, 1976), Vol. II in preparation. 94 The Sequestration of Voice intended to. An African drum language is not such an abstract signaling code, but rather is a way of reproducing in a specially stylized form the sounds of the words of a given spoken language. Only recently have knowledgeable descriptions of various drum languages been worked out, and our knowledge of most such languages is still somewhat defective. To arrive at an understanding of how drums operate, one must first have a command in depth of the normal spoken language which the drums adapt, and then discover the principles governing the adaptation. That is to say, to understand African drum talk one must know the spoken language being used-for one drummer will drum his native Duala, another Yaounde, another Lokele-and, in...

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