Musical bow, mouth bow, iridináp

Bowed musical bow system used by the Gavião people of Rôndonia State in Brazil, described in Moore & Meyer (2014) and Meyer & Moore (2013). The instrument itself (iridináp in Gavião) is a string attached to the ends of a thin, curved piece of wood held up to the mouth as a resonating chamber; another identical instrument is used as a bow, vibrating the string at three different levels of pressure that produce three main pitches (2013:316). The language is tonal, with L, H, downstepped H, and derived high-falling and low-rising contour tones, as well as vowel length contrasts (2014:616-7). The encoding system is a ‘sung mode’, reproducing the tone-note associations of specific pieces of Gavião vocal music, where H and L tones are encoded with higher and lower pitches on the musical bow respectively. Pitch mapping has two registers, assigning H and L tone either to the high and middle pitches, or to the middle and low pitches respectively; players can change registers in between phrases or repetitions of the same phrase (2013:321). Contour tones are simplified to their initial pitch register: e.g., the low-rising syllable aã́ is represented by level lower pitches on the iridináp (2014:632). Downstep is encoded (2013:319). A long vowel may be encoded with a note of longer duration or with two short successive notes (319). The instrument is played solely by women (310). Content includes texts employing archaic/poetic language, especially for courtship dialogues (315).

Meyer, J., & Moore, D. (2013). Arte verbal e música na língua Gavião de Rondônia: Metodologia para estudar e documentar a fala tocada com instrumentos musicais. Boletim Do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas, 8(2), 307–324.,Moore, D., & Meyer, J. (2014). The Study of tone and related phenomena in an Amazonian tone language: Gavião of Rondônia. Language Documentation, 8, 24.