Talking drums
Tambores parlantes
- Date
- documentados desde el s. XVIII · confidence low
- Place
- Kumasi, Ashanti, Ghana
- Credited to
- Akan (atumpan) and Yoruba (dùndún) peoples
- Field
- Communication
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
Drums that imitate the tones and rhythms of tonal languages, so that the listener recognises conventional phrases. They allowed messages to be sent from village to village faster than a messenger.
Their antiquity is unknown; Europeans described them from the first half of the 18th century. Carrington (1949) analysed how they compensate for tonal ambiguity with redundant formulas.
What it led to
- long-distance communication between villages
- drummed royal poetry and genealogies
- information-theory studies of redundancy