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African Polyphony and Polyrhythm

Musical Structure and Methodology

Simha Arom, Translated by Martin Thom, Barbara Tuckett, Raymond Boyd, Foreword by Gyorgy Ligeti

Book DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518317

Online ISBN: 9780511518317

Hardback ISBN: 9780521241601

Paperback ISBN: 9780521616010

Chapter

4 - Towards a new method pp. 103-105

Chapter DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518317.013

Cambridge University Press

 TOWARDS A NEW METHOD 103

of some kind. Moreover, none of them can be used for polyphony involving the human
voice or certain string and wind instruments. To achieve our aim of providing an
analysis of Central African polyphony, we therefore had to find some method which
would both apply to all types of vocal and instrumental polyphony found in the region,
and properly reflect the musical reality. It seemed obvious that such a method should
be based on sound recording techniques which could be applied in the field. Currently
available autonomous equipment does not, however, allow simultaneous separate
recording on more than two channels, however many microphones are used. In one way
or another, we always come back to the problem of having to separate out the parts
of a whole.
It then occurred to us that, instead of recording with several microphones on a single
occasion, we might try recording with a single microphone on several occasions. This
would involve applying the so-called "playback" technique, i.e., the diachronic reconsti-
tution of a set of musical events which take place synchronically in real situations.

Towards a new method

We are now about to describe a new method which has enabled us to obtain the results
presented in this work. It came, not as a brainstorm, but as a result of the kind of
long and sometimes tortuous processes, as is often the case. The reader may find it
helpful if we outline the main stages in the process which led to its development; we
therefore hope he or she will excuse the personal nature of some aspects of the following
presentation.
In 1967, we were working on the monodic song-tales of the Ngbaka people in the
Central African Republic. These pieces have no regular accentuation and are performed
a cappella, i.e., they contain no materialised metric or rhythmic point of reference.
We were faced with the problem of finding out how to determine the periodicity of these
songs, which meant discovering the key to their temporal organisation. It occurred to us
that an answer to this question might be found if we first recorded the song and
then asked the singer to record the same piece again, this time clapping his hands. We
naturally avoided telling him exactly how this should be done. The Ngbaka performer
would then straightforwardly provide us with the basic pulsation for the piece involved.
We hoped to obtain a new recording in this way, containing enough metric reference
points to enable us to transcribe the durations within the song. The singer's handclaps
must be intimately connected with the music, and could therefore leave no doubt as
to their accuracy, and consequently, their validity as reference points.
Unfortunately (actually quite fortunately for us), things were not so simple. For when
the musician re-recorded his song, his version was not identical to the earlier one.
Instead, he introduced variations involving changes in the way some of the melodic

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104 B O O K III T E C H N I C A L T O O L S : M E T H O D S OF R E C O R D I N G

segments were combined. Although the differences were slight, the second version
would not necessarily suffice for accurate location of the pulsations in the earlier version
with no accompanying handclaps. Our problem was to get a recording where the
hand-claps could be made to coincide with the original version without ruining it.
We therefore decided to have the musician listen to the recording of the song he had
just sung and clap his hands in time (this he could do without difficulty), while we
recorded this superposition on another tape. This yielded two documents, the original
recording of the song for analysis, and a reproduction of poor technical quality
which nevertheless clearly showed how the singer's hand-claps should be superposed.
This gave us exactly what we wanted: both a culturally authentic document, and a
separate working document which contained an exact replica of the former.
When subsequently faced with the subtle problem of transcribing polyphonic music,
we tried to adapt our earlier procedure to the investigation of simultaneous musical
phenomena of much greater complexity. We did this by first recording one of the
polyphonic parts, and then proceeding with another part as we had previously done
with the hand-claps, so as to obtain one recording of the individual part and another of
two superposed parts. The problem was then to extract the second part from the second
recording so as to get two separate parts. Since, however, we only had two monophonic
recorders to work with, we carried on to get at least a set of useful results. We then
found a way of isolating the second part, which could also be generalised and used
to separate out any part in even the most complex polyphony (Arom 1973).
By way of example, suppose we want to obtain separate recordings of all the parts
played by a group of n drums, which we will designate as drum 1, drum 2,. . .drum n.
We use one recorder (A) to make a series of recordings of each individual drum part.
The output jack of recorder A is then connected to the input jack of a second recorder
(B), to which a microphone is also fitted. Drum 2 listens through headphones to the
part played by drum 1, as played back by recorder A, and simultaneously plays his own
part. This is picked up by the microphone of recorder B and is thereby 'mixed' with
the part played by drum 1, which is being re-recorded on B through the input jack.
This gives us one recording each of drums 1 and 2, and a mixed recording of both.
However, when drum 2 can hear drum 1, he will not perform his own part exactly as
he did when playing alone.
If we now try to repeat this operation working with drums 2 and 3, we are likely to
find that drum 3 also varies his part somewhat, and that the same thing happens with
every pairwise step down the line.
This procedure thus leads inevitably to serious problems in both transcribing the
individual parts and obtaining the complete score (e.g., for drum 2, should we use the
version recorded separately on A or the one mixed with the part for drum 1 on B?).
These problems could be solved by using a third recorder (C), unconnected with A or B,
to obtain another separate recording of the part played by drum 2 while listening
through the headphones to drum 1. At the next stage, this separate recording of drum 2
was played for drum 3 on A. At the same time, the parts played by drums 2 and 3 were
mixed on B, and drum 3's part was recorded separately on C.
After n operations of this kind, we had thus obtained:
- a separate recording of each of the n drum parts (note that, with the excep-

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 THEORETICAL ASSUMPTIONS 105

tion of the part played by drum 1, each has been recorded as performed when
mixed with the immediately preceding part).
- n - 1 mixed recordings.
Each drum part included in a mixed version is thus the same as the one recorded
separately. The requirements for coherent transcription are thereby satisfied.
In this way, we were able to conjoin a field method and a laboratory technique in a
single process, so that we could actually do laboratory work in the field. We would
thereby hope to escape, at least in this area, from the awkward situation pointed out by
Alan Merriam (1964: 38):
Despite the fact that ethnomusicology is both afieldand a laboratory discipline, and that its most
fruitful results must inevitably derive from the fusion of both kinds of analysis, there has been
both an artificial divorcing of the two and an emphasis on the laboratory phase of study.
In trying to restore field work to its rightful position, we encountered some of the
difficulties inherent to experimentation in the social sciences, but we also recovered the
invaluable advantage of being able to subject our results to immediate checking, as we
will see below.

Theoretical assumptions

At this point, we must set out the theoretical foundations of our method. We will first
have to state a postulate. Any polyphonic piece of music can be looked at as a complex
sound structure characterised by the superposition of a given number of coherently
related monodies. This leads us to the following assumption: insofar as a polyphonic
piece is based on a coherent structuring of all its parts, each of these parts must be
coherent in itself. If this is true, each part should be playable separately, i.e., have its
own individual existence in sound, just as it exists in the mind of the person who per-
forms it. By this hypothesis, if we can isolate each part and determine the points at
which it fits together with the others (or at least one other), we may assume that we have
all the elements we need to reconstitute the polyphonic structure. For insofar as the rela-
tionships between parts, or between any part and the whole, are coherent, the number
of linkage points must be relatively small. The whole can thus be reconstructed, even
without the complete set. These interrelations are furthermore based on the principle
that all the musicians performing a polyphonic piece will start to play or sing their
parts, not simultaneously, but consecutively. This principle holds not only for tradi-
tional African music, but also for almost all known forms of orally transmitted poly-
phony. The only reference used by the individual musician will thus be the part of the
musician (or one of the musicians) who has already come in.

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