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1. Musical surrogate languages in the documentation of complex tone: the case of the Sambla balafon

   https://doi.org/10.21437/TAL.2018-13  

   McPherson, Laura (June 2018, Proceedings of Tonal Aspects of Language 2018)

   In documenting an undescribed language, tone can pose a significant challenge. In practically no other aspect of the phonology can such a small set of categories show such an overlapping range of pronunciation, especially in level-tone languages where f0 slope offers fewer clues to category. This paper demonstrates the unexpected tool offered by musical surrogate languages in the documentation of these tone systems. It draws on the case study of the Sambla balafon, a resonator xylophone played by many ethnicities in Burkina Faso and neighboring West African countries. The language of the Sambla people, Seenku (Northwestern Mande, Samogo), has a highly complex tonal system, whose four contrastive levels and multiple contour tones are encoded musically in the notes of the balafon, allowing musicians to communicate with each other and with spectators without ever opening their mouths. I show how the balafon data have shed light on a number of tonal contrasts and phenomena and raised questions about levels of the grammar and their mental representations. 

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2. Artistic adaptation of Seenku tone: Musical surrogates vs. vocal music

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5578834  

   McPherson, Laura; James, Lucas (January 2021, Contemporary African linguistics)

   Akinlabi, Akinbiyi; Bickmore, Lee; Cahill, Michael; Diercks, Michael; Downing, Laura J.; Essegbey, James; Franich, Katie; McPherson, Laura; Rose, Sharon (Ed.)

   The tonal nature of many African languages has long raised questions about mu- sical expression and the relationship between language and music. The two main areas of inquiry have been the relationship between tone and melody in vocal mu- sic (tonal textsetting) and the role of tone in musical surrogate languages (e.g. talk- ing drums). However, the degree of similarity between these two genres in terms of tonal adaptation has remained an open question. In this paper, we present a case study comparing the role of tone in two musical traditions from the Sambla ethnic group of Burkina Faso: vocal music and a balafon (xylophone) surrogate lan- guage. We show that the two have different systems of tone-note correspondence and level of phonological encoding, indicating that musical adaptation of tone is not monolithic. We suggest that these different systems of tonal adaptation may stem from functional, structural, and cultural differences between the two musical genres. 

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3. The role of music in documenting phonological grammar: Two case studies from West Africa

   https://doi.org/10.3765/amp.v7i0.4493  

   McPherson, Laura (June 2019, Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology)

   Though the study of metrics and poetic verse has long informed phonological theory, studies of musical adaptation remain on the fringe of linguistic theory. In this paper, I argue that musical adaptation provides a unique window in speakers’ knowledge of their phonological system, which can provide crucial evidence for phonological theory. I draw on two case studies from my fieldwork in West Africa: tonal textsetting of sung folk music in Tommo So (Dogon, Mali) and the balafon surrogate language in Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso). I show how results of these studies provide evidence for different levels of phonological grammar, the phonetics-phonology interface, and incomplete application of grammatical tone. Further, the case of the balafon surrogate language shows how studying music can be a valuable tool in language documentation and phonological description. Finally, preliminary study of Seenku tonal textsetting suggests important differences in the level of phonological encoding in vocal music vs. instrumental surrogate speech. 

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4. Categoricity, Variation, and Gradience in Sambla Balafon Segmental Encoding

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.652635  

   McPherson, Laura (May 2021, Frontiers in Communication)

   null (Ed.)

   This paper analyzes the musical surrogate encoding of Seenku (Mande, Burkina Faso) syllable structure on the balafon, a resonator xylophone used by the Sambla ethnicity. The elements of syllable structure that are encoded include vowel length, sesquisyllabicity, diphthongs, and nasal codas. Certain elements, like vowel length and sesquisyllabicity, involve categorical encoding through conscious rules of surrogate speech, while others, like diphthongs and nasal codas, vary between being treated as simple or complex. Beyond these categorical encodings, subtler aspects of rhythmic structure find their way into the speech surrogate through durational differences; these include duration differences from phonemic distinctions like vowel length in addition to subphonemic differences due to phrasal position. I argue that these subconscious durational differences arise from a “phonetic filter”, which mediates between the musician’s inner voice and their non-verbal behavior. Specifically, syllables encoded on the balafon may be timed according to the perceptual center (p-center) of natural spoken rhythm, pointing to a degree of phonetic detail in a musician’s inner speech. 

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5. Seenku

   https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100318000312  

   McPherson, Laura (January 2019, Journal of the International Phonetic Association)

   Seenku (ISO 639-3: sos) is a Western Mande language of the Samogo group, whose other members include languages like Dzùùngoo (Solomiac 2014), Jowulu (Djilla, Eenkhoorn & Eenkhoorn-Pilon 2004), and Duungooma (Hochstetler 1996), spoken on either side of the Mali-Burkina Faso border. The endonymic language name Seenku sɛ̃́ː-kû] (also spelled on Ethnologue as Seeku) literally means ‘thing of the Sɛ̃ː ethnicity’, but it is widely known to outsiders as Sembla (variant spelling Sambla), which doubles as an exonym for the ethnicity. Seenku has two primary dialects, Northern and Southern, spoken in villages approximately 40 km west of Bobo-Dioulasso in Burkina Faso (see map in Figure 1). This study focuses on the more populous southern dialect, particularly the variety spoken in and around the large village center of Bouendé (local name [ɡ͡béné-ɡũ]), with a population of approximately 12,000 speakers; the Northern dialect, spoken around the village center of Karangasso (local name [təmî]), has a population of approximately 5000 speakers and was the subject of a sketch grammar (Prost 1971). The southern dialect had until recently received little scholarly attention, with the exception of a Master's thesis on the morphophonology at the Université de Ouagadougou (Congo 2013), but is now the subject of the NSF Documenting Endangered Languages grant supporting this research (BCS-1664335). Other published work includes McPherson (2017a, b, c, d). 

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