A worldwide documentation of musical surrogate languages
Blaise Tahoulan plays the ayogbon musical style. Photo by Laura Mcpherson 2022. Click on image to access collection.
| Language | Fon, Maxi, Gun, Saxwe, Igbo, Akan, Northern Toussian, Hmong Daw, Tal |
| Depositor | Laura McPherson |
| Affiliation | Dartmouth College |
| Location | Benin, Nigeria, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Laos |
| Collection ID | 0748 |
| Grant ID | BCS-1943896 |
| Funding Body | National Science Foundation |
| Collection Status | Collection online |
| Landing Page Handle | http://hdl.handle.net/2196/43326a16-63e7-4c53-90ea-ae70157d0d7c |
Podcast
Summary of the collection
This deposit is the first of its kind to bring together recordings and transcriptions of musical surrogate languages around the world. It is the result of collaboration with linguists, musicians, and community members working together with the goal of documenting these unique musico-linguistic traditions. The work is supported by an NSF CAREER grant “Phonetic and phonological aspects of musical surrogate languages” beginning in 2020. The audio, video, and transcribed materials found here are of broad interdisciplinary interest, relevant to members of the communities, linguists, musicologists, folklorists, and anthropologists, among others.
Group represented
This collection represents multiple groups around the world who practice forms of musical surrogate languages. Each group is diverse in its languages, musical culture, and communicative niches for speech surrogacy.
Language information
This deposit contains materials from multiple linguistic communities. Further information can be found in the metadata for individual sessions.
Special characteristics
To the best of our knowledge, this is the only archived collection specifically highlighting musical surrogate speech. It is also unique in drawing together materials around this theme from diverse languages and communities, rather than focusing on a particular language, as in traditional language documentation. This allows those interested (linguists, musicologists, anthropologists, community members) to explore the similarities and differences between musical surrogate languages around the world.
Collection contents
This collection contains high quality audio and video of musical surrogate speech in communities around the world. In its current state, all materials have been elicited by the research team to explicitly demonstrate speech surrogacy, i.e. none of the sessions show fully naturalistic uses, though the content of the recordings ranges from fully natural (the type of speech and discourse typically played in the tradition) to experimentally constructed stimuli (to test the productivity of the system and its speech-music mappings). In some cases, especially the musical groups from Benin, the collection also includes musical performances where speech surrogacy is involved but not explicitly highlighted.
Collection history
This collection has grown out of an NSF Early Career Award granted to the depositor in 2020 (BCS-1943896). The first recordings were by Laura McPherson in Benin in 2022, but the current collection represents the collaborative efforts of an international team, including researchers from Laos, Nigeria, and Ghana. We welcome the collaboration of anyone interested in the documentation and preservation of musical surrogate traditions worldwide.
Acknowledgement and citation
Users of any part of the collection should acknowledge Laura McPherson as the principal investigator; please refer to metadata for individual sessions for other researchers, musicians, and collaborators, who should also be acknowledged by name. This work is funded by a US National Science Foundation CAREER grant BCS-1943896.
To refer to any data from the collection, please cite as follows:
McPherson, Laura. 2023. A worldwide documentation of musical surrogate languages. Endangered Languages Archive. Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/2196/e54c604a-7235-4e76-aaef-1265571d9ef6. Accessed on [insert date here].
