Transcriber: Carolina Becerra Merino Reviewer: Denise RQ
My goal today is to present the language of percussion
in a light different from how it's conventionally perceived,
beyond just tapping your feet or bobbing your head to a specific rhythm,
or the percussional phrase that you may have heard or find familiar.
I'm going to do this by drawing a parallel
between verbal language and percussion.
The instrument I'm going to use is right here: the mridangam.
It's a South Indian hand drum
that traces back over 3,000 years ago.
So, let's begin.
Diction, accent, and inflection -
to me, these are the three dimensions of verbal language
that allow for impactful communication.
Diction, to me, is your choice of words
or the order in which those words are sequenced.
And words are essentially a combination of meaningful sounds.
So let's look at these four sounds.
(Playing mridangam)
If we sequence similar sounds, create similar words, create a full phrase
then we have the following phrase.
(Playing mridangam)
The second dimension is accent,
or an emphasis at a certain point or multiple points within a word.
So let's take this word
(Playing mridangam)
and accent parts of it.
This is how it'll sound with the accents.
(Playing mridangam)
And if you were to create a full phrase sequencing this word,
you'd have the following phrase.
(Playing mridangam)
As you probably heard, the accent delivers a shape for the overall phrase,
allowing the audience to better anticipate
what I'm trying to say or what I'm trying to convey.
And this is true in verbal language, as well.
The third dimension is inflection,
or a change in pitch within a word or within a phrase.
To me, inflection essentially has the strongest weight out the these three
in terms of carrying the tone of what is being conveyed.
(Playing mridangam)
So, although I've tried to separate these three dimensions,
in a practical setting in reality, they're all intertwined.
Even when I try to highlight one dimension over the other,
I've had elements of the other come in and play a part of this.
So, often times, it's good to wonder, "Do we really need all three of these?"
Accent and inflection play an interesting part
because they can often carry the complete meaning
or completely change the meaning
even though the diction stays the same.
For example, let's just take this phrase,
"Yeah, right! I love the Cooper Union!"
versus this phrase, "Yeah... right. I love the Cooper Union."
I mean is the same exact phrase, but with completely opposite meanings.
Why?
Because I have a pause between the 'yeah' and the 'right.'
and because I have an inflection on the word 'love'
that carry a positive connotation; and that translates to percussion.
If we were to take this a step further,
and just take diction out of the mix completely
- and I know we've all been in this situation somewhere,
like your first job where you're thrown technical jargon at
and you don't know what they mean,
and you're trying to figure out what's going on
while you pull it from context, from the tone;
if your boss is angry enough at you, we try to gather that,
or, in an extreme case, you're thrown in a completely different country
and you don't know the language,
and everyone is speaking a different language,
but you can still gather from context
the mood, the emotion, and the tone that is being conveyed.
That's really the point that I'm trying to make:
even though we may not understand the language of the mridangam,
we can still understand the emotion or the tone that is being conveyed,
or for any percussion for that matter.
So I guess my goal throughout this presentation
was to get to this point
where percussionists and audiences can work together,
and the percussionist can share his or her emotion,
and the audience will be willing to receive it.
I'd like to finish on this note
with one last piece that embodies this concept
of simple things, simple emotions, like anger
(Playing mridangam)
or happiness
(Playing mridangam)
or calmness.
(Playing mridangam)
This piece will demonstrate all these three emotions and many more,
and I hope you'll be willing to receive them.
(Playing mridangam)
(Mridangam music ends)
(Applause)