In Kenya, certain mountain dwelling tribes use drums to communicate messages from one area to another. There are metric and tonal patterns used to send warnings about danger (say, the imminent presence of a pride of lions headed in a certain direction), played on a pair of what we would term in Western music 'kettle' drums.
This goes even further into my argument, as I originally only considered the realistic possibility of music communicating less 'literal' or 'specific' ideas (eg feelings of love, melancholy, enthusiasm, etc).
Through drumming, these tribes also interpret their own spoken language on a more humanistic, 'expressive' level. The example I witnessed was the recitation of a native poem, first spoken, then 'repeated' on the drums. But the drumming was not merely 'imitating' the rhythm or pitch; it was, to the native speakers,
literally 'saying' the line, simply without the use of a mouth or vocal chords. In short,
the drum was 'speaking' the lines. This was an idea I had not previously considered.
I was also struck, more generally, on the concept of a certain phoneme borrowed in Western music from an older, African 'language' tradition--the polyrhythm. While teaching the class the concept of the polyrhythm 2 against 3 (two in the time of three, or vice-versa), both I and the teacher simultaneously explained "once you know how it sounds and feels, you just HAVE it" and it sticks forever. This is not unlike the process in learning a language where one must recognise the phonemes of his/her own language as a child (which we do instinctively, just as we instinctively 'exclude' other sounds even though our bodies are capable of producing them--sometimes even more easily than we produce those of our own language). During second-language acquisition, the biggest boundary for most people is the conquering of the phonemic boundary--to make the native sounds naturally, intuitively, as a native speaker does. Grammar can be learned, rules and exceptions can be memorised, vocabulary can be studied, but phonemic understanding is the key to fluency and ease of communication.
The example of the 2:3 fits into the same category as learning the sounds of, say, aspirated and unaspirated /b/ or /p/ for English speakers. Instinctively, we actually produce both variations of each of these letters, depending upon their placement in a word. But screw with the placement (putting an unaspirated b or p as an initial, for example) and many, likely most, native English speakers would have an extremely difficult time reproducing the sound spontaneously. It would take concentration and effort, not because we are not capable of doing it, but because it seems unnatural to us in that usage. If you want to learn certain dialects of Indian languages, though, you'd need to be able to both hear and speak those differentiations instantaneously and fluidly.
Our 'Western' minds are perfectly capable of playing a 2:3 pattern, but the effort required for most of us to 'know' the sound and feeling of it is fairly formidable for some. African musicians must think we look like idiots for struggling with it--it seems to come 'naturally' to them. Why? Because it is a part of their language, both musically AND, as it turns out, literally.
