Sabar: Music and Language in Senegalese Drumming

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

Yoad Winter is a linguist working on formal, computational and experimental semantics. He is chair of Computational Semantics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Language Sciences of Utrecht University. Winter has been PI of the Drum Languages project (NWO Free Competition grant), ROCKY project (ERC Advanced Grant) and of the NWO VICI project "Between Logic and Common Sense". He serves in numerous editorial boards. His books and articles have appeared in many international forums of formal linguistics, including MIT Press, Edinburgh University Press, and Springer.

Presentation of the project

"In this talk, I will share findings from fieldwork with Senegalese griots (poets and musicians), whose art exemplifies a unique interaction between language and music. Using video footage, I will demonstrate how the art of these griots reveals a special connection between music and grammar, highlighting linguistic phenomena such as singular/plural and definite/indefinite distinctions in sabar drumming. I will offer preliminary insights into the theoretical implications of these observations. The talk will conclude with the screening of a new short documentary exploring the life and art of the legendary sabar master Doudou Ndiaye Rose."

Speaker

• Yoad Winter is chair of Computational Semantics and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Language Sciences of Utrecht University..