Music for tama (talking drum) and computer performed by an oral-tradition musician.

In this page you can read about a project carried out during my doctoral thesis: "Multimedia writing in the musical composition" in the CICM of the Université de Paris 8 are.

The project had as a main goal to answer these questions:

How to carry out an electroacoustic composition for a musician of oral tradition ?
How to tell the musician what, how and when to play?
How can the musician be synchronized with a previously made recording?
How can he play in a work where the sound of his instrument is treated by a computer?

These questions have already been answered. In general, the answers to all the questions coincide on one point: thanks to a multimedia score it has been possible to give indications to the musician of oral tradition so that he can play in the context of an electroacoustic work.

Fig.1 Músico griot Senegalés Pape Mbaye ejecutando el tama.

Work Created

In order to answer the research questions, two experimental composition projects were carried out in which the musician Pape Mbaye, a griot from Senegal, collaborated. In both compositions, Mbaye plays the drum "tama" or "talking drum".