I have been reviewing Codes and Ciphers by Alexander D'Agapeyeff that I picked up yesterday (update: it has eventually sold in 2011) in a local store for my book business. The book was originally printed in 1939 and tells about the history of coded messages and the use of ciphers to conceal meaning. He goes into his time spent in Africa in an unnamed country in the "bush", or rural areas. He recounts the surprise of the early European explores in the jungle areas who were met by the local peoples, apparently already knowing of their impending arrival for some time. Then he mentions his own experience using the wooden drums, referred to more accurately as slit gongs. They are capable of generating sounds in two distinctive tones, which corresponds to syllabic intonations in certain languages.






And he talks about translating a short phrase from ordinary speech into the drum language using a long sound, a short sound and so on. He does not get into the specifics, but it would appear to be a coded transformation of spoken speech into a drummed equivalent, with compensations for certain ambiguities like homonyms (words that sound alike but are different) and using certain well-known phrases to distinguish similar sounding or named objects.



It gets even more interesting when he starts discussing his own experiments to extend the distance of the drums by using a knowledge of physics and humidity conditions to create more powerful signals that could be heard at 4 or 5 times the regular distance. He mentions how the drums are mounted on the tops of the giant termite mounds, which are made of earth, but perhaps with all the tunnels and crevices inside and outside, they have acoustic resonance that can amplify the sound and make the sound carry further. He talks about how he built his own drum that could carry a signal, under the right conditions, along a river, with certain humidity levels for over 20 miles.

And he hints of subtle complexity:

When I asked the natives why the drum was beaten and what it was saying, they would call up the local ‘drum man’, and he would translate the sound into a kind of sing-song, using certain set phrases and often words not found in the native vocabulary. When questioned he would say that it was a‘drum word’ meaning so-and-so. This shows that the drum code is almost a dictionary code,and I have an idea that it is based on vowels forming the four possible sound combinations into set words, of which there can be a maximum of 120.

A fascinating recounting of a time long ago, in a place far from familiar experience about unfamiliar languages and how they could be encoded in the rhythms of the night.