Seenku – An Intersection of Language and Music: Lecture by Professor Laura McPherson

Sigma Nu (12 Webster Avenue) at 6:00 PM

Dinner Provided



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As part of this evening's dinner discussion, Professor Laura McPherson will talk about her fieldwork in Burkina Faso where she has been documenting an unwritten language called Seenku, which is spoken by 12,000 ethnically Sembla people.


In the course of working on the language, she became aware of a fascinating tradition bridging the divide between language and music: a so-called "surrogate language" in which the words of Seenku are transposed onto the traditional resonating xylophone by encoding tone and rhythm. In this way, musicians can communicate without ever uttering a word.