Verbal art and music in the Gavião language of Rondônia: methodology for the study and the documentation of speech played on musical instruments

Abstract

In a language with distinctive tone and length, such as Gavião of Rondônia, the first question about speech played by musical instruments is the relation between the melodies and the super-segmental phonology of the corresponding words in sung speech and in normal speech. The sung speech is useful for learning and explaining the musical notes. It is influenced by the phonological possibilities of the spoken form and by the musical possibilities of the instrumental form, being intermediate between the two. This art is performed with various Gavião traditional musical instruments. The role of the instrumental sung speech is artistic and also practical, to help to maintain the oral heritage. This practice represents a little-studied and threatened cultural heritage of the traditional substratum of the cultures of Amazonia. On the Indigenous Reserve Igarapé Lourdes we used an original methodology to document this phenomenon in the musical instruments which the Gavião collaborators identified as 'speaking' or 'singing'. The recording and transcription sessions necessary for this type of research will be explained here. They show the relation of acoustic iconicity which exists between the words and the music. Linguistic analysis makes it possible to understand the phonetic and phonological nature of the iconicity.

Keywords

• Gavião of Rondônia
• Music
• Musical instruments
• Instrumental speech
• Sung speech
• Phonological tones