AUTHOR=Akinbo Samuel Kayode TITLE=The Language of Gángan, A Yorùbá Talking Drum JOURNAL=Frontiers in Communication VOLUME=6 YEAR=2021 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.650382 DOI=10.3389/fcomm.2021.650382 ISSN=2297-900X ABSTRACT=

It is widely known that Yorùbá drummers communicate through their native drums. This paper investigates the grammar of gángan, which belongs to a family of Yoruba drums called dùndún. The results of this study show that Yorùbá drummers represent the phonetic realisation of lexical and grammatical tones of their language with the drum. Statistically, the speech tones and the acoustic correlate of the corresponding drum representations have a significant positive relationship. In both spoken and drum communication, vowel (V) and consonant-vowel (CV) prosodic units have different statuses. To conclude, Yorùbá drummers communicate via the gángan drum by transposing certain phonemic features and maybe phonological conditions of their language to musical forms.