tabla, pakhavaj, paran, bol paran

Percussion system used in the North Indian classical music tradition. The instruments are the pakhavaj and the tabla; the former is a double-headed barrel drum, and the latter an adaptation into two separate hand drums. The system is of the acoustic-iconic mnemonic variety, with nonsense syllables (bols) representing various drum stroke techniques and timbres; the extent of the iconicity between speech and drumming is contested but evidence suggests systematic sound symbolism (Patel & Iversen, 2003). One subtradition, the "bol paran

reproduces Sanskrit and Hindi texts by matching bols to spoken syllables: "First