Senegalese Sabar – is it a drum language?

Abstract

Current research focuses on the Senegalese drum language – Sabar. Sabar rhythms are derived from speech in Wolof and therefore represent verbal utterances. This paper reports a study that is meant to uncover regularities between Wolof units and Sabar strokes given a dataset collected in Senegal. Research materials include drum and speech recordings collected during field trips to Senegal. This data is analysed, and the first analysis is presented in the article.