An indigenous Amazon tribe can swap messages over 20 kilometres or more, simply by beating out rhythms on pairs of drums. It turns out the rhythms of the drumming mimic the entirety of their spoken language.
The live in parts of Peru and Colombia. They use drums called 尘补苍驳耻补谤茅.
A pair of drums, each a cylinder about two metres long, . The drummer stands between the drums and beats聽each with a rubber-covered mallet in each hand.
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Each drum has a slit along its length, with a larger hole at each end. It can produce notes of two different pitches, depending which side of the slit the drummer bangs. Because one drum is bigger than the other, they have different pitches, giving four musical 鈥渘otes鈥� from each pair of drums.
of the University of Grenoble Alpes in France and his colleagues studied 169 messages sent by five expert drummers, in order to figure out how the messages convey information. 鈥淪peech is reduced to rhythm combined with two pitch levels,鈥� says Meyer.
They found that the different notes only play a minor role translating Bora language into 鈥渄rum鈥�. Instead, the key element is the rhythm of the drumming, which closely matches that of spoken Bora language.
鈥泪苍 尘补苍驳耻补谤茅 messages, the number of beats equals the number of syllables,鈥� says Meyer. The lengths of the subtle pauses between beats were related to equal spaces in Bora spoken words.
What鈥檚 more, certain beats identify nouns and others verbs.
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Most Bora messages are split into four sections: an introduction, the sender鈥檚 ID, the main message, and a sign-off.
The introduction might be a command like 鈥淐ome now鈥�, or 鈥淏ring now鈥�. The second section reveals the sender鈥檚 clan and gender. The message itself is a short instruction, such as 鈥渢o go fishing鈥� or 鈥渢o chew coca鈥�. The sign-off is a jokey message like 鈥渘ow don鈥檛 say I鈥檓 a liar鈥�.
A single message typically contains 60 drumbeats, encoding around 15 words. They would translate as something like: 鈥淏ring now! Member of the Pashaco palm clan Rodolfo. Bring coca leaves for toasting! Now, don鈥檛 say I鈥檓 a liar.鈥�
Drummers also play 鈥渟et pieces鈥� to precede announcements for events like drinking competitions. Both drums are sometimes played together as a 鈥渞ingtone鈥� to announce that a message is coming.
Today, the drum messages are falling out of fashion and only 20 尘补苍驳耻补谤茅 drums remain, Meyer says. There are only 1500 Bora people left, and聽many are learning Spanish.
Royal Society Open Science
