The dùndún: at the interface between speech and music

In this project, we ask what is that distinguishes speech from music?
Every day, we easily tell the difference between these two types of auditory stimuli, but which acoustic features are important? And what about when speech and music are produced by the same instrument? We are used to distinguishing singing vs. speaking with the human voice, but did you know there are also drums that can “speak”?

We asked people both familiar and unfamiliar with the dùndún talking drum to classify its performances into speech or music. It turns out even those unfamiliar with the language of the drum could do so above chance! But how?
Read our paper to learn more!

In a series of follow up studies, we are asking whether speech and music really are the most salient cateogires to listeners – what happens when we don’t give people the labels “speech” and “music” but simply allow them to sort the dùndún recordings into two groups? What semantic and acoustic categories are most important to them? Check out our preliminary results here!

Press and Outreach:

Child-friendly version of our dùndún research published in Frontiers for Young Minds!

Nachrichten: When Drums Talk: How We Distinguish Speech from Music

Photo credit: Cecilia Durojaye