I found the mathematical notation of the sequence of boring the finger holes in the ancient indigenous end-blown notch flute (pendag or palendag) in the Philippines.
[Constant number 6 represents six units of the effective length (i.e., 1/2) but can vary depending on the total length of the bamboo internode.]
This describes only the specie of flute found among the inlanders of Southern Mindanao. The Philippine Northern Cordilleran flute also shares the same principle of ratios; but they use finger widths in the parenthetical equation (above). A C4-D4-E4-G4-A4 pattern of tones can be generated from this mathematical notation.
This mathemstics speaks to a theory of pentatonic scale that is not based on the Pythagorean “cycle of fifths” nor the Chinese wuyin (pentatonic scale) system.
[My deep respects to the genius of the ancestors of the archipelago.]
[Revised draft of paper, formerly titled “Aesthetic Mimesis in Indigenous Philippine Music,” given in an online lecture organized by the Museo ng Katutubong Kaalaman or the Museum of Indigenous Knowledge on 25 April 2022. For citing this paper, please use this information. Gratitude is expressed to Corazon Alvina, director of the museum, for inviting me to present my research findings.]
Introduction
Indigenous Philippine music, vocal and instrumental, is a marker of cultures that are partially shared among the inhabitants of the islands. These inhabitants speak aboriginal languages belonging to Western Malayo Polynesian family. In this paper, I focus particularly on the concept of auditory mimesis among a select group of people, the creative imitation of sounds in nature, which evolution can be traced back deep in history, perhaps after 40,000 BCE or before the Austronesian migrations from Taiwan. In this prehistoric period, very little is known at the moment. But if we assume that bamboo and wooden instruments were already in use, the discovery of the affordances of a few bamboo and tree species as materials for music instrument making was very likely, just as clay loam soil was already used at that time to make not just earthen ware but also burial jars, in as late as the neolitihic period (c. 4,5000 to 3000 years ago). The capacity to make music a symbol of something else went beyond needs to find food and shelter. This is evident not just in the mimetic icon, a mental representation, of the journey of the human soul in the Manunggul secondary burial jar, but also in the phenomenological perception in original islander music played on bamboo and wooden instruments. It can be argued that mimesis served as a foundation for both language and music that gave a competitive edge to humans to populate and colonize the islands. Going back deep in time, mimesis was what initiated the transmission of stone tool technology of hominins for a million years. But I will not go into this early mimesis since my interest is in the modern embodied mind of homo sapiens in the Philippines, which imaginative mimetic capacity was what enhanced the islanders’ sociality and capacity to build cultures that were adaptive to the archipelago, a biome rich in flora and fauna.
Many of these musical instruments are extant in the archipelago today in “pocket cultures” that are continuous with the oldest music cultural stratum in Philippine history. This music, a living tradition, is markedly “auditory mimetic” and its practice comes from a deep past in the sense defined by cognitive scientist Merlin Donald. The material on mimesis that I will be presenting today is pertinent to oral, face-to-face, small scale cultures in the islands with fully developed mythic or linguistic capacities, just as we are today. In particular, I refer to embodied mimesis found in indigenous oral communication, instrumental music, song performances, and ritual in the Philippines. There is practically no research on this topic in the Philippine music research literature to date, which is understandable given the non-familiarity of interdisciplinary method. This is of interest to scholars doing work in cognitive science and bioculture. At the outset, the paper will not utilize the idea of literary mimesis by Eric Auerbach and the anthropological theory of mimetic desire by Rene Girard.
In local Philippine languages, mimesis is a cognate to the term gaya in Tagalog or sundog in Cebuano. Studies by Piaget and Vgotsky have shown the importance of imitation in the development of the infant, particularly in the realm of socialization that leads to the acquisition of language. This research, however, sidetracks symbolization, which is already above the realm of direct experience and perception. More pertinent to the presentation here are studies in evolutionary biology in the last forty years or so that have confirmed the importance of mimesis in (1) the production of culture or “things learned in a lifetime [that] are passed on to future generations,” (2) the emphasis on prelingual bodily (action) schemas that linguist Zlatev had lucidly argued, (3) sociality, and (4) the cultural transmission of technology, which–considered from the Darwinian concept of selection pressure–feedbacks to the environmental niche, thus enabling modern humans to thrive (Tomlinson 2017). There are also a few scholars working in the new field of biosemiotics, but this is not what the essay is about.
Since mimesis principally deals with prelingual signs, the principal question that the essay asks is how it operates in inidigenous Philippine music and dance expressions, particularly those that came out of rainforest environmental niches. The paper primarily validates the postulate of neuroscientist Terrence Deacon on the flexibility of aesthetic-cognitive faculty in the modern human mind, the argument of humanities scholar Gary Tomlinson who had applied Deacon’s idea, and that of Zlatev on the importance of mimetic schemas in prelinguistic intersubjectivity. The data presented herewith were collected in 1990s and from research visits granted by the National Research Council of the Philippines in 2016.
Music starts with the phenomenological bodily grip of objective aspects in select sound objects that are attended to in the environment. Experienced as a gestalt, it moves to become embodied cognitive-emotional, aesthetically patterned, ludic expression. It is intentioned to convey “information” in perceived sound objects that were once indeterminate but now determinate at the level of imaginative reality or as a virtual “make believe.” In culture, it is a shared social experience that transfigures, as a way of reflecting, the interactions that humans make vis-à-vis the things of their worlds. Music draws attention to itself as a sign and to its referential object, making both bodily experience and mental representation. In evolutionary biology, Donald argues that mimetic hominins transformed themselves, given natural selective pressures from the savannahs in Eastern Africa, into a culture-carrying and speaking-specie because of their more ancient mimetic ability to transmit knowledge of stone tool making, thanks to episodic memory. This happened from the middle to upper Paleolithic period and had cascaded down into the brains of modern humans since two hundred thousand years ago. Gradually, over a very long span of time of adaptation to the environment, the mind, inch by inch, expanded its consciousness. But it started with embodied proprioceptive representations, which schemas were mimetic. Later, the schemas got expressed into words, units in abstract symbolic representational system that we call language (Zlatev).
Allow me to give an example on what this means. This does not come from the very distant past but, in fact, the present, providing us a lesson that we are not actually far away from our prehuman ancestors. I will play to you a recorded Philippine pop song in which the idea of mimetic representation is remarkable. The song is titled “Mekaniko ng Makina Ko” (The Mechanic of My Car Machine) by Bayang Barrios. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=JnYhMbMBMPI> It starts with a sound sample of a car engine ignition. This is followed by an interlock of a Kalingga bamboo buzzer with another metallic sound which, based on interpretant I have in my mind, is a twangy icon of the creaky suspension parts of a car needing repair. Lyrics-wise, the preponderance of /k/ phoneme in the rhyming words “lubak lubak,” “tibok tibok,” “ugak ugak,” are a sound symbolism of the effort that the car exerts as it is towed to the side of the road. The melody of the verse ends with a wavy contour as if the wheels of the car swerves involuntarily. Then in the chorus, the song protagonist hails the imagined mekaniko with the phrase “tag, tag, tag, tag, malalaglag na ang puso kong bihag.” The non lexical particles “tag, tag,” are iconic of a body being beaten by worldly problems but, also referring to the singer’s predicament as an index to a truth. Alas, she has fallen in love with the mekaniko and likens her body as needing emotional repair from him.
I brought this song to your attention because it is a fine example of contemporary auditory mimesis that we, modern humans, have been doing for the past 200,000 thousands years, in our case 40,000 years ago in the island. If we were already able to represent the idea of the journey of the souls of the Dead in afterlife in the icon sculpted on the secondary burial jar lid from Tabon cave Palawan, which was defintely mimetic in representation, then something similar to this was done in music. This is the subject matter of my paper. In my description of Bayang’s song, I introduced Charles Peirce’s semiotic categories such as icon and index, firstness and secondness levels of prelingual signification, and I will elaborate more on these below. As a sign with endless possible interpretants, music harnesses its qualities (i.e., iconicity) and deploys these to indexical physical relations to contexts that are culturally conceived and that inform users’ use of interpretants. The triadic understanding of sign-object-and interpretant is what shapes music’s meanings, triggered of course by prior memory and associative links in the brain (cf Turino) and by other minds in a social world. Thus the phenomenon that neuroscientists have called “distributed cognition” can be drawn in here, although this is a topic that I have to reserve in a future research. When shared, music generates intersubjectivity–the capacity to feel and think in the shoes of other sentient beings. It is this intersubjectivity that we are able to understand the witty use of symbols in Bayang Barrios’s song. Taken as a medium for this relationship, music’s embodied expression contains constraints on how its patterns are to be defined and used in diverse circumstances in artistic communication. The symbiosis between this music + technology in an environmental niche and the sociality of music being functionally a form of communication pushes the emergence of human culture in the realm of imagination and sensations (aesthetics). As a faculty of mind and body, music is not epiphenomemal but, like the other sensory arts, is central to being human as many humanist scientists now recognize. In this domain, the embodied mimesis, which is the kind of mimesis the essay elaborates on, acquires language-like properties in which rhythms, pitches, and timbres are combined into a texture of parts nested within larger groupings (i.e., heirarchy). In his landmark work, Gary Tomlinson hints at the complementarity between language and music in a million years that led to the emergence of music and language among modern humans. This was incremental, built from the mimetic capability to rehearse and advance proprioperceptive skills and thus thinking, enlarging our brains in the process.
In this paper, I will describe a select set of bodily mimetic practices in indigenous Philippine music. These are (1) the sound symbolism in onomatopeia, an evidence of semiotic cross modality when voice and sound of instrument are imitated in words, (2) the exteroperception and proprioperception that become the kinesthesia of verticality of pitches in bamboo instrument playing. From these examples, we understand the mimesis to be necessarily an integrative communicative process that involves a conscious awareness and reflexivity of the body’s orientation in interaction with other beings in an ecological niche with its affordances and constraints. But since we are dealing with auditory aesthetic communication, we take into account the ground for its emergence due to the “open-ended” imagination in the signification, which is motivated by values, attitudes, and beliefs, in short by culture. It is this cultural imagination that blends, juxtaposes, or transfigures skills in order to produce intended or “emergent” emotions that are primarily in the realm of “make-believe,” i.e., aesthetic (sensations + imagination).
Mapping sounds to words: onomatopeia
Sound symbolism onomatopeia, particularly imitating natural sounds to words, can be found in the roots of words for most, if not all, of indigenous Philippine music. The tool that I used for this deduction is Blust’s and Trussel’s The Comparative Austronesian Dictionary, which is available in both print and online. Western Malayo-polynesian verbal roots such as *tugtug (beat, pound) and its related roots *-teg (hit, beat) or *-tek (clicking or light knocking sound) are in contemporary indigenous Philippine musical vocabularies and are sound icons, to use Charles Peirce’s terminology. Onomatopeia is also evident in the roots of words for other instruments such as *-tang (clanging sound), *-nang (bright sounds), *-ting (clear, ringing sound), *-tong, *-bal, *-bang, *-nang, and, of course, *-gong. The inscription of natural sounds into roots of words demands further scrutiny but, for this paper, I limit my discussion to the epistemology of sound in relation to the topic of auditory mimesis.
Among the Agusan Manobos, sounds called “tanog” are distinguished from “tingug,” the former of which seems to be related to the roots *tugtug,” *tang, and *ting. “Tanog” in Agusan Manobo denotes sounds from inanimate musical instruments (i.e., *tang + *tug), while tingug (*teneR), literally “voice,” (i.e., teneR + *tug) belongs to another object of reference, that is, one associated with immanent vitality (Buenconsejo 1993). Gelacio et al’s 2000 Dictionary of Agusan Manobo does not provide this distinction to the two glosses, labelling both as sound and specifiying the latter as “voice.” Comparatively, the Tagalog equivalent for playing music is “tugtug” (similar to Manobo “tanog”) and “tinig” for voice (Manobo “tingug”).
My deduction on the distinction between “tanog” and “tingug” came from observations on how the two terms were used in day to day discourse. The crossmodality of mimetic representation, however, i.e., mapping out one type of sound object into another medium of sign, makes for blended distinctions. The sound of unpatterned rhythm or patterned rhythm (lisag), for example, which is generally termed “tanog” can shift to “tingug” if the referent changes, that is, if the latter simulates speech or a kalitokan (message through words). The two categories are therefore not discrete, confirming the already said principle of crossmodality and flexibility of mental operation. In that culture, words (kagi), the units of human speech, can be articulated in a number of musical instruments such as jaw harp, kogot, sagoysoy (ring flute), but not pendag (notch flute), which is associated with sustained sound and in paried drum and gong, which is primarily used as a rhythmic entrainment device. When tingug is cast with the “weeping” sound ajenged, the sound becomes the chant called tud-um. When hearing this, any Agusan Manobo of the 1990s, would immediately conjure in the mind a rich semantic space of ritualistic action associations.
Agusan Manobo tud-um is vocal sounding associated with the act of bodily trembling whenever a spiritguide is believed to eclipse the normal persona and singing voice of the singer. Normatively, Manobo traditional chant is sung in interpersonal contexts. It conveys a variety of acts such as expressing hospitality, hard words, and is sung as the voice of a singing spirit from the mythical mountain that is seen and heard in the all-night divinatory song journeys (gudgud) and in possession rituals (hinang). Because of the song’s broad performative contexts, bringing with them the referential ritualisms, the sphere of song spans both “sacred and secular,” a conceptual division that does not exist in Manobo cultural imaginary. It can be said that the interpretant of singing can easily slide from one of these two opposing pragmatic contexts. In discussing (aesthetic) symbolization, Terrence Deacon states that
“[Sign] is a mediated form of representation…. Acquiring this system in the first place may involve learning reinforced by repeated physical co-occurence, but once the system is in place, co-occurence of word and objects is no longer critical, since the reference is held together and maintained indirectly via the vast, repeatedly explored web of symbol-symbol associations. (34)
Let me play to you an example of a shift in the chant’s interpretant, from a personal voice to that of spirit. This was recorded in darkness inside a farm house in the middle of a forest clearing. I arrived in that place intentionally to record Manobo chanting. The family was reluctant because of the danger a song can pose to them. Nonetheless, the singer, the male head of the household, complied despite reluctance. The song was done when we were all lying down to sleep for the night. The song proceeded as usual with no tremblings, but, after thirty minutes or so, a “spirit attack” (yana-an) did occur, demonstrating the transformation of the content of the song expression to that of the spirit.
If we were to analyze this act, the “content” of the vocal expression thus moved to a different domain in the sphere of interpretants in the mind a contingent moment. We can adapt Deacon’s representation of the neurological process behind this shift. In the figure shown, sign-vehicles are matched normatively to their objects of reference, but since the process is mediated, arrows with encircling heads (diagrammed below between S’s and O’s in light gray color) that go to different directions in the middle intervene in the simple mapping of signs to objects. [See figure 1 below)]

There is another way of explaining the dynamism of the interpretants of the song. Agusan Manobo chant expression is basically the same in style: the vocal quality is guttural and thus the sounds of the words are “harsh” and “tensed.” It can be posited that Agusan Manobo chant tud-om is governed by two expressions (+/- bodily tremblings), warranted by a resemblance in singing style. However, these two expressions have the same bodily mimetic schema CHANT-ing. I capitalize the word “chant,” to emphasize the concept of bodily mimetic schema. This is not a mere “mental operation,” but is a phenomenological perception that is an embodied action in the perceiving subject. The schema pulls within its orbit various associated acts of ritualizing that the action “chant” is, having to do with interpersonal encountering. In performance, the enactment of the schema thus necessarily pulled the body to that state of trembling.
This case of blending in the contents of expression of chants is evident in other examples. The case of the verbal analogue “apad” that is articulated in selected Maguindanao instrumental music instruments such as agung, gandingan, and kulintang pieces is another. This is quite well known but I wont have time to discuss it here. Similar sound symbolism is also found in Hanunuo Mangyan “disguised speech” in jaw harp.
In the next section, I will elaborate on another type of auditory mimesis, this time dealing with another process, i.e., the embodied perception of kinesis in nature into two types of bamboo music.
Proprioperception of Movement to Kinesthesia Gesture
The mimesis of movements of insects and animals in the environment is exemplified in the sustained sounds of the widely distributed indigenous vertical notch flute pendag in the interior of Mindanao Island. This is one type of five (non-western) flutes in the country, the notch flute being the most important because it carries mythic associations. [See Figure 2] I will focus on this type of flute only.
All Philippine flutes show a consistent manner of making them. The finger holes are bored with reference to the midpoint of the effective length of the bamboo internode. Jose Maceda had documented this in his 1990 article and found out the distribution of this manufacture mostly in the Philippines and few islands outside of the country. This is not found in Taiwan.
The notch flute, or sometimes called “lip valley flute,” is found in two regions—northern cordillera in Luzon Island and many inland places in Mindanao island. The geographical distance between these two big islands is wide and implicates either monogenesis (a diffusion from a single point of origin) of tradition or independent cultural innovation in two non-contigous places in the archipelago. The fact that the manner of placing the blowing holes in the making flute is similar tends to favor the diffusion hypothesis. This hypothesis would imply a long span of migratory time, and most likely multiple. The only thing certain at this point is that this must have been invented as long as the time when modern humans in the Philippines have started using bamboo. The bamboo specie used for indigenous flutes in the Philippines is Schizostachyum lumampao (Blanco) and is endemic only in Philippine archipelago. Since the largest concentration is in Mindanao, it may have come from a point of origin in that place.
Among the Agusan Manobo and Obo (in Southern Cotabato), the mimesis is demonstrated in the gesture the flute player makes, which maps out the perceived movements of his fingers (of both hands) on the flute, stopping and opening the four blowing holes bored into a type of a slender bamboo internode with thin skin. I posted a documentation of how this is played in my YouTube channel, in a clip dubbed “Nature’s Presences” [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBavvWzY9Gg at playing time 6:16]
The bodily position of the fingers, ambidexterity, fits the space of measured holes and would not have been possible without the affordance of the just mentioned species of bamboo endemic to the archipelago and the bodily grip that phenomenologically perceives the sound object.

In his 1990 article, Jose Maceda has argued that Philippine flutes give evidence of a tuning system based on the octave, rather than one based on the cycle of fifths that was codified in China or, using a different material, by Pythagoras in Greece (but borrowed from the Babylonians). This principle is seen in the placement of blowing holes in the South Cotabato Obo flute. The first hole, which is in the dorsal side of the flute’s body, lies at midpoint of the total length of the whole that is measured by units, each of which is the circumference of the flute. The next holes are proportionally placed on the ventral side, within the lower half of the flute’s body, one after the other in a gapped pattern. The distance between the first hole and second is one unit, but the distance between holes two and three is two units. This pattern of “one plus two is three” is repeated beginning from hole three, thus creating a simple mnemonic pattern of the first three natural whole numbers. The third hole, which is the ¾ point of the total effective length, is the point for starting the repeated pattern for “one plus two equals three.” The last hole, the fifth, which is too far to be reached by the finger, marks the end of the effective length of the flute that produces the fundamental.
The third hole is an important stop in the effective length of the notch flute. This practically lies on the midpoint of midpoint of the effective length of the tube. It acts as a “divider” between “high” and “low” spaces of a piece. Akoy Sgalang, belonging to the South Cotabato Obo group, seen in my YouTube channel playing the instrument, calls this juncture “milil” or “crossing”. The last hole is “data” or plain and its opposite (the second hole) is “nuged” or “ascent.”
A music transcription of a piece (Illustration 4) from Akoy would show that the dualism or contrast between high and low is aimed at; the music is a vertical undulation between the notes near the fundamental and notes above the octave. As such, the music expresses the verticality of recalled bodily experience, or metaphorically, of up and down of things in the landscape, a hill or of climbing a tree. In my fieldwork, the player himself tells the myths behind his music. One is about the race between the bird and the snail in reaching the top of a hill. The other was about the squirrel running down the tree trunk faster than the fallen fruit. In short, the images are of animals traversing the verticality of space.

In semiotics, the music is an iconic gesture, borne to a phenomenology of perception, that is a re-experiencing of the sound object mapped unto the kinesthesis of fingers running through the flute’s body. It is an imitative sign of embodied perception. I emphasize the word “embodied” for the mind in the brain is never divorced from the environment or the world to which the body and mind inhabit. Music is time and here it is re-enacted. In neurological terms, which is already an “after the experience,” it is a cognitive activity known as mimesis, in which exteroperception is “translated” into proprioperception in the brain, matching it into the mimetic schema of the movement and then rendred kinesthetically on to the body of instrument. Again, perception here is enactive thanks to the instrument that is the body’s extension or a technology for its articulation.
Among the Agusan Manobo, this same type of flute has a different set of referents. One piece deals with imitation of the sound of crickets at dusk time, a clear example of sound symbolism that, far from this culture, is found in another, the same Obo of South Cotabato. The cricket sound recollects the sentiment of experiencing melancholia in the encounter of approaching darkness. The other two pieces in Agusan Manobo represent the leisurely swinging of monkeys on tree tops and here the sound object resounds the experiencing of horizontality in space. There is also nother one and, more important, the Agusan Manobo experiencing of the vast wetlands along the edges of the mighty Agusan River. This sound resembles the ajenged sound of ritual song tud-um chanting. Agusan Manobos have mythologized this in the story about the weeping of the male crocodile Dinageyuan yearning for the union of his partner Dehunajun. Like the South Cotabato Obo, the Agusan Manobo piece is evident of the proprioperception of pitches that go up and then down the flute’s body and is an iconic re-experiencing of the crying voice.
A noticeable aspect in the two examples from Mindanao just shown is the near circular breathing in its performance. This pertains to the example from the Maguindanao group, also from Mindanao. My documentation is a performance by a Moslem pandita, Ismael Ahmad. His piece embodied the felt melancholy of gripping with a sound object that is constitutive of the deep tradition from the past. I argue that the mimetic schema for this is not just a mental mimetic representation but a recovered phenomenology of the body, flowing in time through a continuous breathing, that is primarily primordial and gestural.
Imitating a movement perceived in nature and then kinesthetically rendering this into a recollection of embodied experiencing of an artistic sound object as gesture in an instrument is found in many more examples in Mindanao and Luzon islands. I no longer have time to enumerate these. The retention of similar knowledge of making and playing the instrument suggests a deep history of the modern mind and its corresponding skill in an environmental niche. Following the postulate (Donald) that the mimetic mind predates the mythic in the human mind, the prehistory of this bamboo flute music in the Philippines, yet subsisting today as a living tradition, is something to be appreciated. I already mentioned previously that the affordance of the bamboo species Schizostachyum lumampao for the flutes that humans in the archipelago was discovered at around the time when they were also utilizing the bamboo plant. I am considering here an original music invention from the islands that was most likely developed and circulated, like the ancient clay earthenware, before the alleged Austronesian migration or language and rice and millet agriculture dispersion out of Taiwan (Bellwood).
Historical linguistic evidence suggests that differences in the names of this type of flute in Northern Philippines, i.e., between Negrito groups and Northern Cordillerans, are due to the retention of pre-austronesian lexicon. A similar discrepancy occurs in the names of the flutes among the indigenous people in inland Mindanao. Yet the method of making the instrument in which the placement of blowing holes are reckoned from the point of the division of 2 over 1 or of the octave, is consistent from Luzon to Mindanao, and even all the way down to Nias, but not crossing Eastern Central Austronesian area. The depth of time of its use suggests that the instrument is a work of a Western Malayo-Polynesian mind in the archipelago because, to repeat, the bamboo specie for this instrument is endemic only to the forested environments of islands. In addition, given a sample of 35 flutes in the Philippines, Jose Maceda was keen in understanding that a theory of scale based on this division of the octave was significant for it predated and diverged from the Chinese system or the Pythagorean tuning based on the cycle of fifths. It would be logical to conceive that the theoretical octave interval, the only real consonant interval, would be discovered first by the early modern humans in the islands before the fifth interval would. But this would be another topic of another research paper.
Another type of bamboo instrument is the bamboo polychordal zither. This is made out of another species, one with a shorter internode and with a thick bark. It affords the shared interlocking music texture that is a characteristic of most indigenous Philippine music. The Manobo Dulawan calls this instrument togo. Among the adjacent group T’boli, it is sludoy. The difference in the vocabularies points once more to the retention of old words (Donahue). Plucked with the fingers of two hands, the instrument should not be confused with another one known as takumbo. This has only two strings (paired strings) and are struck with a stick at the center, while the thumb plucks a string at the side. The paired-string struck and plucked bamboo internode instrument plays only dance rhythms. The two instruments, polychordal zither and bamboo paired-string zither, therefore, diverge because they have different musical functions. The polychordal zither plays instrumental music and can simulate speech and song, while the bambo paired zither is for accompanying dances.
The Manobo Dulangan togo has six to seven strings which are actually strips of the skin of the bamboointernode that are peeled and raised from the tube with bridges.
The strings (1, 2, 3 for left fingers and 4, 5, and 6/7 for right) are arranged symmetrically around the bamboo internode, with the seventh one separate from the set of six and is called “fintatabok” (or string for “crossing”). Sometimes, an optional 8th string is located beside the seventh string and is put with reference to the older style of playing.
The symmetrical placement of the strings fits the ambidexterous design of the human body. Phenomenologically, this attests once more the grip of the body the sound object. The tube is held with one end attached to the body’s navel (the other end points downwards), while the fingers of both hand alternate in plucking it. Strings are plucked in twos, the finger pattern of 1/6, 2/5, and 3/4 being the most common one. One can observe that the just said combination creates a “palindromic” numerology from “one side” to the “other side.” As mentioned previously, this instrument can imitate or re-experience movements of external objects as well as the voice in song. An example of the former is the embodied image of sea wave, the swaying from this side to that side and can, like the flute, do a kinesthetic mimesis of the referential object, this time, of seawaves. The instrument can also copy the contour and rhythm of the voice in song, demonstrating the crossmodality in the mimesis.
Conclusion
In this paper, I explored a set of indigenous Philippine music via a wide theoretical lens. This approach, I believe, led to connections of music with other domains such as ecology, science of the mind, evolutionary biology, prehistory, historical linguistics, and phenomenology of perception. In particular, I confirmed the validity of existing postulates in recent litearture on music semiosis, particularly on the concept of mimesis, which is universal or which is specific to the human species, although asserting that this has to be understood in terms of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. I began the lecture with a sound example of a contemporary pop song to argue that contemporary auditory expression is still significantly mimetic, though today our brains are “wired” to extended memory devices such as computers and internet. Yet, from the past thousands of years, the modern aesthetic faculty to imitate what is in the environment has endured. I showed how the human body perceives iconic qualities and indexical connections to external sound objects in the environment, justifying mythic references to them. Language co-evolved with the imaginative, artistic, mimetic bodily impulses of being-in-a-world. This was shown in the examples provided previously in which sound symbolism occurred as sounds in the environment, particularly human made instruments afforded by nature’s materiality, are mapped as words in vocabularies. I also supported Deacon’s hypothesis that aesthetic representations are mediated in the mind so that objects of reference or interpretants, to use Peirce’s semiotic, can be blended to create “novel” imaginative expressions, “offloaded” so to speak from their day to day utility. Hypothetically, it was mimesis that brought about the involuntary bodily tremblings in the Agusan Manobo tud-om performance. Then, I talked about kinesthetic embodiment in which movements of objects in external reality are simulated in instrumental music. The “simulation” is possible due to intentional, prelingual bodily mimetic schemas that get re-experienced in verticalized and horizontalized “melodic” contours. Although I talked at the level of generality, the mimetic framework to understand why indigenous Philippine music has been that way can be utilized deductively to other examples in the future. This would, I hope, bring us a closer to an understanding of music in the evolutionary terms that impacts on the way why modern humans are unique, yet still a part, in the animal kingdom.
References Cited:
Blust, Robert, and Stephen Trussel. 2013. ‘The Austronesian Comparative Dictionary: A Work in Progress’, Oceanic Linguistics, 52/2: 493-523.
Buenconsejo, José Semblante. 1993. “The Ted-Em Among the (Agusan) Manobo, Mindanao, Southern Philippines: Musical and Textual Characteristics of an Improvised Discourse Sung in in-and Out-Group Performance Context.” Master’s Thesis, University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
Buenconsejo, Jose. 2002. Songs and Gifts at the Frontier: Person and Exchange in the Agusan Manobo Possession Ritual, Philippines. New York and London: Routledge.
Buenconsejo, Jose. 2017. “Nature’s Presences: Music of the Manobo Dulangan, T’boli, Obo, and the Tagkaolo Communities in Southern Mindanao,” volume 1 of Resilient Music at the Margins. Research grant provided by the National Research Council of the Philippines. DVD.
Deacon, Terrence. 2006. “The Aesthetic Faculty,” in The Artful Mind : Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, edited by Mark Turner. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Pages 21-56.
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The boxed set of four video documentaries with accompanying research monograph titled “Music-Cultural Flows and Exchanges in Pulangi River, Maguindanao: The Making and Circulation of Gongs and Bamboo Music Instruments” is now available. This is the research grant output of Dr. Jose S Buenconsejo of the University of the Philippines funded by the National Research Council of the Philippines.
The documentary videos were filmed in the provinces of Maguindanao and Sultan Kudarat in 2022-2023. It explores the shared and unique indigenous music traditions among the Muslim Maguindanaon and their neighbors, the “lumad” groups Teduray and Manobo Dulangan.
Music instruments such as the kulintang, two-stringed lute kudyapi, and vertical bamboo flutes are shared across the three ethnolinguistic divisions but not the bamboo polychordal zither and idiochord kagul, which the Maguindanaon no longer have. The absence of these cultural markers in Maguindanao lowland suggests cultural transformation after Islam diffused into the landscape a long time ago, a duree of contact and maritime trade that continues today, albeit connected to a different social process of migration as in the transnationalization of kulintang and kudyapi. A much deeper cultural flow can be discerned, however, in the sound aesthetics of “drone and melody” in wooden and bamboo instruments.
Below are the titles of the documentaries.
Video 1: Si Tokan: Ang Manggagawa ng Kulintang sa Maguindanao Ilaya
Video 2: Ang Kapitana: Women in Teduray Music and Ritual
Video 3: Water of the Mountains: Traditional Music among the Manobo Dulangan
The fourth volume of the NRCP research grant “Music Cultural Flows” titled Karatuan will have its first screening on May 15, 2023 at the Videotheque, UP Film Center. Free Admission.
This is a rare research documentary
by Jose S Buenconsejo, PhD
featuring
Karatuan Kalanduyan, kudyapiq teacher, with his family Kalano and Nissan, brother Kanapia and sister Kanaot; kudyapiq players Kundo Talin, Alex Kamad; tumpong player Sadika Timbang; and dikil singers Basir Saliangguto, Mantiong Alba, Angkanan Maliga.
camera man Rajii Marren Lunas
non-linear editing and trailer Dr. Crisancti Macazo
Synopsis
This is a documentary on the Maguindanaon two-stringed lute kudyapi, which tradition is sustained by Karatuan Kalanduyan, teacher and instrument maker in Bulod, Sultan sa Barongis, Maguindanao. Associated with courtship in old Maguindanao culture, kudyapi music draws a resemblance in its tuning with the gongs-laid-in-row kulintang. The sustained sound of drone and ornamented melody characterizes the sensations that one gets in listening to both instruments. This aesthetics is also evident in the wooden and bamboo kulintang as these are heard in between the seasons of waiting for growing rice that the irrigated plains of Maguindanao are known for. This documentary therefore connects human leisure to practical activities, especially in the tenure of land once known as sharecropping. Recent linkages with export labor and entry of outsider banana plantations would coerce changes in the economy but the styles of playing the kudyapi had remained resilient to the impact of this encroaching modernity. The documentary also presents a rare performance of sung Islamic religious poems in the event called dikkil that is still practised through the centuries by the pandita.
Water of the Mountains: Music, Divination, and Myth of the Obo and Manobo Dulangan in Sultan Kudarat, Mindanao
Volume 3 of the NRCP video documentary series “Music Cultural Flows”
Researched by Jose S Buenconsejo
Abstract
Like water that generates life and that heals, history of cultures does not flow in a neat and linear manner but adapts to gravitational pull and to the contours of its surroundings that, in return, physically shape it as it moves in the landscape. The Obo myth of creation is an allegory of archaic humans being swallowed by water –a singularity–after a needle, a technology of culture, punctured the body of earth. The mind who invented this fiction conveys a universal truth yet this myth is particular to the place that I visited in the mountains of Sultan Kudarat, which is dotted by numerous springs and traversed by streams. Bathing on this body of water that cleanses dirt and the kulintang kayu that accompanies celebratory dance as a form of human solidarity in the time of death is the theme of the Obo song duyoy as regards to their cultural hero Gamfey. The notion of magical birds on trees, some marking protection while other portending omens, image of the ring, the use of bow and arrow and the magical tube skirt malong are proofs of cultural flows from nearby cultures that had exchanges with the ancestors of these highlanders deep in Southeast Asian prehistory. But the study of this past, archeology, would be empty without being informed of local knowledges behind the science of measuring artefacts.
The study of music instruments from this place was the key to unravelling the mythic idea of centeredness, an “axis mundi” of a thing in the world, so to speak. The body, expecially the hand, which makes useful objects, is fundamentally important in hominin cultural adaptation for millions of years until the emergence of the human species some 200,000 BP. The aesthetic concept of referencing the bamboo holes and strings, and the volume of wooden blades is akin to the singularity of the water hole from which the other strings are tuned accordingly from the center. The myth is so durable that it withstood time, resonating with other domains in the indigenous cultures of the place. The flow of this myth to other parts of the Philippine archipelago remains to be studied in the future and this opens the possibility that the people from this place might have descended from a group in an unknown homeland in Sulawesi via present day Maitum, Sarangani. There is a likehood, for example, that the preserved hand stencils in caves in Sulawesi (dating 40,000 years ago) might be related to the art of divinatory ritual still in practice among modern T’boli, Obo, and Manobo Dulangan.
A research documentary by Dr. Jose S Buenconsejo to be premiered on December 12, 2022, 2:30 (Philippine Time) at The Videotheque of Cine Adarna in UP Diliman campus.
This documentary reflects on the life of a distinguished woman Ang Kapitana (The Captain) in the mountainous village of Bayabas, Upi Maguindanao. Through a socio-centric approach in rendering her biography, one can trace the connections of women’s activities to music, their role in ritual, and their sociability as members of a Teduray upland community.
Women’s work is highly valued in this world whose residents are centered on small-scale, but intensive agriculture. More than men, they make their own baskets made of materials from the environment and these, being “friendly objects,” remain an important means for transporting farm products to the markets and for containing ordinary things in their day to day existence as well as in the materialization of ritual performances. Women play vital roles in the preparation of these extraordinary events, especially in the harvest of first grains, music making, and in celebratory dances during weddings. It is not surprising therefore that music mimetically represents womanly activities, a number of pieces of which depict their enduring attachment as parents to their children, their gait, emotions, in short, actions in a social world.
Crisancti Lucena Macazo, PhD is an amateur filmmaker and photographer, violinist, educator, vlogger, and an independent scholar. He obtained his Doctor of Philosophy in Music degree from the University of the Philippines, Diliman in 2020 with the dissertation titled, “Music and Image: The Soundtrack of Manuel Conde’s Extant Films, 1941–1958.” His dissertation’s central thesis is on the narrative capability of music in films. Among his works in filmmaking include, Buhayin! Ang Musika sa Talambuhay ng Tao (Let Live! Music in the Biography of a Person) where he did the art directing, editing and music scoring (written and directed by JS Buenconsejo, 2022). His latest project is the fine editing of both color and sound of the documentary film Si Tokan: Ang Manggagawa ng Kulintang ng Maguindanao Ilaya (Tokan, the Kulintang Maker of Upriver Maguindanao), directed by JS Buenconsejo, 2022. Dr Macazo also directed, edited, and scored a short film by Christine Marie Magpile, My Mother’s a Frontliner (2021).
Rajji Marren I. Lunas is an Associate degree holder in Computer Technology from the Technological Institute of the Philippines, Cubao. He has done camera work for the short film Buhayin! Ang Musika sa Talambuhay ng Tao (2021) and Si Tokan: Ang Manggagawa ng Kulintang sa Maguindanao Ilaya (2022).
Everyone is invited to the initial screening of the above-captioned on Thursday, 11 August 2022, 2PM, Abelardo Hall Auditorium, University of the Philippines College of Music
Synopsis:
This is a story of a remarkable traditional Maguindanaon musician nicknamed Tokan who plays for village celebrations and who also makes kulintangan instruments which are currently in demand locally and internationally. Rather than seen from an individualist lens, the documentary interprets Tokan’s life as wholly socialized, centered on group interactions, especially with his kindred. His work continues the music of Tangguapo which kulintang music was first documented by the National Artist in music Dr. Jose Maceda in 1954. The military encounters with Moslem separatists, settler paramilitary group Ilaga in late 1960s were the context of the continual displacements of the villagers to safe places theareafter, especially with military operations against insurgency in 1972. This displaced the culture bearers of the place, once the center of gong and lute music of the region. In 2015, a family returned to the sitio to bring back their lives to the land they were born into. But ironically for Tokan, it was his travels away from home, away from wars, that made his gongs move to faraway places.
The documentary is Volume 1 of 4 in the Music Cultural Flows Series.
The film is mostly in Filipino and English with some Maguindanao. Duration: around 80 minutes. Color.
A community film project on traditional music in the lives of ordinary people.
The Ethnographies of Philippine Popular Music Culture group, based in Ateneo de Manila University (Department of Development Studies) and which is a consortium of scholars from the said department and the University of the Philippines Colleges of Music and Mass Communication is pleased to announce the completion of its third video production, this time a short narrative film with documentary footages of folk festival in Obando.
The synopsis of the film and rationale of the project goes:
“The reality of Filipinos going overseas for work creates a condition of alienation (nangulila) for both the traveller and those left behind. Yet, the need to eke out a means of living and the promise of material prosperity for the future override the painful separation that often leads to extra-engagements with others as emotional needs and feelings of loss are compensated by those leaving and entering state borders.
This is the backdrop of the story that this film is about: a woman from the working class who, first decides on aborting her pregnancy, but later– with free will–rescinds to safeguard her body and baby. It was the memory of music and warm companionship that motivated her choice for that path of happiness.
From another angle, this story is also about the story of traditional music band of bamboo instruments (musikong bumbong) in a Tagalog community. Like the devotion to saints, bamboo music, bamboo arches made into art (palamuti), native delicacies are forms of indicating collective euphoria in human relationships and togetherness.
The story focuses on the idea of human agency as a form of redemption from material wants, difficult the choice might be. This redemptive will is generated by an indomitable spirit of human solidarity and values.
Any resemblance of the story to real persons in actuality is purely coincidental.
All the actors in the film are amateurs, belonging to two families in a small community who do not have prior training in the art of acting.
The impulse to pursue this cinema project was hinged on the idea of capacity building among a marginalized group and on the goal of creating an alternative vision of cinema that does not cater to the commercial glossy.
The project is funded by the CHED-NCCA SALIKHA program in the Ateneo de Manila University.”
The schedule of the preview of this film is still being planned but would most likely be in January 2022.
I wholeheartedly thank the small commnity in Obando for the realizing this project. The poster was designed by Hubert Fucio of UP Music.
Journal of Philippine Music 