Cross-cultural research into rhythmic features of Gabonese musical patrimonies: music systematics, statistics, and phylogeny
Musics from central african populations are most often voco-instrumentals. Many pieces have a polyrhythmic feature which is shared by all the tunes from the same repertoire. Research conducted by different scholars on music from the Central African Republic and Cameroon have shown that the function of rhythmic features is to characterize each repertoire from a musical patrimony. Thus, each repertoire could be considered as a musical category, defined by a distinctive trait: the rhythmic feature (Arom et al., 2008). The extensive fieldwork I have done in the same region but with Gabonese populations has shown that the situation is quite different: a same rhythmic feature could be found in different repertoires in the same population; different pieces from the same repertoire don’t share necessarily the same rhythmic feature; and an identical rhythmic feature could be shared by different populations in the same repertoire or between different repertoires.
I have conducted a cross-disciplinary research using music systematics, statistics, and phylogenetical methods to describe the rhythmic diversity of Gabonese music and to determine in which context a rhythmic feature could be discriminant (geographical area, populations, ethnonyms, repertoires, etc). This research has been based on more than 200 pieces (vocal parts and drum parts) that have been transcribed. They came from 56 different populations divided into 20 ethnonyms. I expect to use only my fieldwork data to be sure of the population identity and localization.