References

This paper analyses the acoustic-phonetics of the solmization — syllabic representation of musical sounds — for membranophones used for representing rhythmic cycles in Turkish music. (A membranophone produces sound by means of vibrating (a) membrane(s). Drums are membranophones.) Turkish music is known for its utilisation of a large number of rhythmic cycles, each of which is represented as a combination of specific syllables such as düm, tek, te, ke, tek, and kâ. These syllables are stringed in different orders to represent various rhythmic cycles. For example, a rhythmic cycle called Evfer is represented in syllables as düm teke düm tek tek, while its veleveleli, or elaborated, version is represented as düm teke tekkâ düme düm tek tek. The present paper analyses düm and tek, which are the most basic syllables in this set of syllables (and bi-syllables), from acoustic and linguistic points of view. It attempts to substantiate the sound-symbolic nature of the düm-tek syllables by identifying in them a principle that is typically observed in the acoustics of sound-symbolic syllables. The principle, which researchers from various disciplines (Ohala 1983, 1984, 1994, Hiyane et al 1998, Hughes 2000) have studied, is correspondence between the F2 values of vowels and the central frequencies or F0 values of the sounds that the vowels represent. This paper also discusses the Mevlevî order of Sufism (based in Konya, Turkey) and its ritual music, where kudüm, a membranophone with which the düm-tek syllables are particularly strongly associated, occupies an important place