The study of evolutionary processes of the harps from Central africa – Ngombi

Methods in ethnomusicology and organology :
The organology developed here will make use of the contributions of ethnomusicology by making it possible to study objects in their socio-cultural context of performance. We will produce a typology of the parameters to be taken into account in the description of the instruments and an inventory of the different values of these parameters.
Method in linguistics :
We will produce a cartography of the different types of terminology (generic names, symbolic names, names of constituent parts, names of materials). The aim will be to produce a comparative lexicon of the terms that express musical knowledge in the language families present in the region.
Acoustic method :
We will develop a methodology based on the development of (1) a hybrid and parametrizable vibro-acoustic model of the instrument confronted with experimental results, (2) a portable measurement system that can be used by non-specialists in the field, and (3) acoustic and vibratory descriptors allowing the characterization and discrimination of instruments.
Method in visual documentation :
Visual sources will be used to complete the knowledge of the instruments in their morphological characteristics, their playing technique (posture, digital technique) and their context of use as well as their symbolism.
Methods of phylogenetic exploratory analysis:
Various methods of analysis will be implemented to respond to the specificity of the material studied and the hypotheses to be tested. Cladistic methods will make it possible, by seeking the characters shared by the different harps, to propose a hierarchical representation of their sharing, or even hypotheses on their mode of transformation over time, to describe possible ancestral forms and to allow connections to be made with changes in user societies.

From a scientific point of view, this project will provide fundamental knowledge about the evolutionary processes of a musical instrument and the interactions between the morphological transformations of an instrument, its acoustic characteristics, its socio-cultural environment and its different denominations. This project will provide important contributions to knowledge in the field of musical evolution, but also in that of the acoustic characteristics of a family of instruments from the African continent. It will contribute to a better knowledge of the circulation and adoption of terminology through different linguistic families and groups. The results will make a major contribution to the precise identification of the socio-environmental factors that influence the evolution of an object. The study of the diversity of harps within the same population can provide important indicators of the vibrancy of the traditional cultural practices with which they are associated. In a French context that is still not used to addressing the issue of cultural evolution, our objective is to show that such work does not amount to establishing a hierarchy between populations. It is a question of showing the transformation processes that have been followed to create the current diversity.
Studying the diversity and the evolutionary processes of a musical instrument can also help us to better understand the relationships between populations that are more or less geographically distant, in particular their possible common origins or migrations.
This project also has a significant methodological scope. It makes it possible to set up an interdisciplinary method that goes beyond the limits of each discipline to study an object.

The implementation of an original methodology could be extended to other geo-cultural areas and adapted for the study of other instruments. By studying the modalities of diffusion of harps and their characteristics, we will also be able to make a contribution to the history of the settlement of Central Africa. By comparison with studies carried out in population genetics in the same region, we will be able to assess the extent to which the evolution of cultural objects is concomitant with population differentiation. Our project also concerns the heritage aspect of the call for projects. By grouping objects in families by optimising similarities, erroneous or incomplete information on certain objects in museum collections can be re-evaluated. This approach seems to us to be particularly relevant for collections including objects from societies with an oral tradition collected since the 19th century, or even the 18th century, whose poor information on the contexts of use can often be deplored. African harps, because of their history and development, are exemplary cases of study of the evolution of instruments, but unfortunately they are poorly documented from an acoustic point of view. Furthermore, a dissemination of the expertise and ingenuity of African harp makers in the face of the shortage of raw materials may find an echo with European instrument makers who are also increasingly confronted with similar problems, as well as with the general public interested in designing instruments from salvaged materials with the advent of «wild harp making«. From a more fundamental point of view, the identification of reliable descriptors for non-linear systems such as the harps of Gabon is of great theoretical and methodological interest, which will have repercussions in many fields other than musical acoustics.

Production of a guide illustrated for descriptions of the harps;
- Planned completion of three theses;
- publication of articles in the various fields covered;
-publication of interdisciplinary articles;
- Creation of a device for measuring acoustic data in the field;

Human societies share the ability to develop cultural traits and to have them evolve in various geo-cultural environments, imposing different types of constraints on cultural changes. Given the geographic spread of human societies and their vast cultural diversity, these changes vary according to the populations considered and to the nature of the observed cultural domains.
Mechanisms at stake in the transformation of a cultural object are still little-known. While one can easily describe the effects of diversity and hence the results of cultural evolution at one precise moment in time, the processes put in place by human societies to culturally distinguish themselves from one another are still rarely studied. Music and language are two of the cultural domains shared by all human communities on the planet.
The ngombi project proposes to study the transformation processes of musical instruments in oral tradition populations while grounding its approach on inter-disciplinary research, combining methods from social sciences and natural sciences. The aim is to understand the specific mechanisms of instruments’ transformation processes, but also to understand the impact of socio-cultural contexts on these mechanisms.
This study, which claims to be exploratory, will concern more specifically Central African harps. The choice of the instrument and of the study’s perspective are due to the geo-cultural anchoring of the team members (CAR, Gabon, Congo, Uganda), and to the research orientations developed i.e. the global comprehension of creation, transformation and diffusion processes of the musical patrimonies’ elements.
Central African harps that are found nowadays, and which exist in the form of historical artifacts in museums’ collections bear witness of the great diversity of their morphologic and acoustic characteristics, of their repertoires and designations. Despite this diversity, it is nonetheless possible to recognize some similarities grounded for instance on the shape of the sound box, the symbolic representation of the instrument, the designation or the associated songs’ themes. Several studies have shown that these resemblances can transcend the identity distinctive features of the populations who use them (ethnonyms, linguistic groups), as well as their geographical dispersion. One of our first hypotheses is thus that, despite the diversity observed, it is possible to reveal proto-forms (which could be compared to hypothetical “ancestors”) on which would be grounded a categorization of Central African harps through the acknowledgment of common traits. Our aim is to determine if the processes leading to harps’ diversity are concurrents of the transformation of their socio-cultural contexts of performance and/or of identity strategies at different levels. The following hypothesis is to be verified: are the harps’ transformations due to adaptations to their performative context and/or to a multiplicity of markers of identity (ethnic, linguistic, technical, symbolic, etc.)?
By using objects from museum collections as well as objects studied in the field, the novelty of our approach is not only to compare objects considering organological, acoustic and linguistic domains, but also to introduce anthropological data, allowing us to take into account the various factors having an impact of the harps’ variability and diversity.