Black people - black instrument


How Aboriginal people mix didgeridoo with Western musical style?

The usual, termite hollowed, eucalyptus didgeridoo has a fundamental drone at around 70 - 80 Hz (C#, D, D#) and overtones 10/12 - 11/12 of an octave - less than a full octave of 12 keys - higher. Some of the multiples of this smaller octave (let's call it didge-octave) can be accentuated by changing the length of the mouth cavity moving the jaws and tong. These accentuated overtones tend to appear at around 170, 560, 760, 1100 and 1800 Hz, but this can differ quite considerably thanks to the irregularities in the bore of the didgeridoo.

On top of this "in most didgeridoo music, the sound is used to accompany story telling or ceremonies, and therefore regularly mimics the noises of nature, such as bush animals and thunder. By both singing and making other vocalizations while simultaneously playing the didgeridoo, the player can produce an amazing array of sounds, ranging from realistic to outright scary. Depending on the desired effect, the player will use the voice to control the sound of the didge, or vice-versa. What is most interesting however, is the strong presence of difference tones while using this technique. (Difference tone is a synthetic tone that occurs when two pitches are played simultaneously. The pitch of this resultant tone is actually the difference between the first two.)" Ben Hammond in The Physics of Dreamtime

The whole plethora of these different didgeridoo sounds is anything but harmonic. Now, this is not what the sol-fa educated western ears are used to. On the other hand it is definitely an exiting experiment to combine the un-tuneable didgeridoo with tonal exactness in the western musical culture.

Charlie McMahon, the white guy who brought the didgeridoo to the pop/rock scene, does experiment with his acoustic didj horns and didjeribone, the variable length didgeridoo to comply with tonal exactness - a mechanical editing of didgeridoo sounds.

Yothu Yindi, the black band, in their pop/rock style music recordings used some other ways to make the didgeridoo conform to the performance protocol and aesthetics of the pop/rock genre. Yothu Yindi, in their recordings,

  •   used a somewhat subdued presence of the fundamental tone in the overall mix;
  •   did post-recording re-tuning of the didgeridoo's pitch;
  •   avoided the blown overtone;
  •   made a heavy reliance upon the use of vocal shrieks for rhythmic fills; and
  •   used a strictly metronomic rhythm.

Yothu Yindi actually uses three different musical styles: pop/rock, clan songs and a Yolngu recreational song form called djatpangarri. Many of the band's songs are purely in one of these three styles, while some combine elements of more than one style. Although the combination is not a new style, rather an alternate mixing, changing to different styles in the same song.

The physics of the didgeridoo excludes the possibility to tune the instrument - tuning the fundamental tone does not tune the overtones, difference sounds, vocals and vice versa - without extreme modifications (didjeribone).

Yothu Yindi's solution to this problem is to live three lives:

  1. a traditional aboriginal life with clan songs rooting in ancient tradition,
  2. a lighter, less restricted recreational yet tribal Yolngu life and
  3. a life in the glare of publicity with flashing lights on body paintings and electronic gear.
Yothu Yindi and Mandawuy Yunupingu can do this but the didgeridoo is made of hardwood, it hardly parts from the clan singer to accompany the electric bass-guitar, it does it only with heavy electronic editing of the didgeridoo sound.

There are other opportunities, plenty of scope in the didgeridoo 'soundscapes for landscape' to experiment with. Find your own dreaming path, tjukarpa in that vast soundscape.