juai, juarai, manguaré

Slit-log drum pair system of the Murui (Witoto) people of the Amazon in Brazil, described in Wojtylak (2016). The instrument itself (juai or juarai in Murui; manguaré in Portoguese) is a “pair of hollowed out hardwood logs each about 150-180cm long and 45-60cm in diameter, each with a narrow slit connecting two holes” (6). Each drum is capable of producing two distinct pitches, but only one pitch of each drum is used for communication; the smaller (‘male’) drum produces a higher pitch, and the larger (‘female’) drum a lower pitch (7). The language is not tonal. In the encoding system, while high and low pitches for a given drummed phrase are fixed, they do not correspond to linguistic contrasts. Only the drum’s rhythm maps onto the structure of a phrase: syllables with short vowels correspond to one strike and syllables with long vowels to two strikes (9). Phrases on the drum are played twice at a minimum, and “tend to ‘end’ with two simultaneous beats … indicative of a ‘full stop’” (9). However, while the drumming does not encode vowel contrasts, a common practice of synchronous humming while playing the manguaré does; high hummed pitches correspond to the “front high and central vowels” being drummed, and low hummed pitches correspond to “back high, low-mid and low vowels” (11). Wojtylak reports only a few extant Murui drum signals, known only by elders; the system is no longer used for long-distance communication. According to Wojtylak, in the past content included announcements regarding danger, arrivals, deaths and summons for people or other clans; currently “the mere sound of the manguaré is interpreted as ‘come’” (8).

Wojtylak, K. (2016). Traversing language barriers. Murui signal drums from Northwest Amazonia. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.35413.22240