TUBS Transcription of the Bakks of Rambax MIT

21M.293 TUBS Transcription of the Bakks of Rambax MIT African music includes diverse instruments, styles, and purposes. Some styles, such as Malian cora playing, emphasize the creativity and virtuoso of a single performer, whereas others, such as Ghanaian polyrhythms, focus on the juxtaposition of multiple fixed parts. Thanks to commercial and academic offerings in world music, African music is also played in a variety of contexts and adopted by nontraditional performers. The necessity and nature of a notation for the music varies drastically depending on the nature of the music and the needs of the performer. During my second year drumming with the Senegalese sabar ensemble Rambax MIT, I decided to transcribe our music for the benefit of the drummers preparing for our upcoming show. I chose an unconventional method of transcription based on the Time Unit Box System (TUBS), Microsoft Excel, and a labeling style used by Rambax co-founder Prof. Patricia Tang. My experience revealed aspects of both the transcription process and the utility of the finished product. I will discuss my decisions in terms of the needs of the performers and nature of the music of Rambax MIT, explore the transcription methods used by authors of instructional and ethnographic texts on various types of African music, and finally examine the benefits and shortcomings of my transcription. Rambax MIT is a sabar drum ensemble begun in the fall of 2002 by Tang and visiting Senegalese griot Lamine Touré. Based on like lifelong experience drumming sabar, Lamine teaches the twenty-odd MIT students a series of musical phrases, or bakks, which are often based on spoken phrases in Wolof. The drum strokes are vocalized using Wolof onomatopoeia, with different syllables representing particular strokes with the dominant hand (holding a stick) and the non-dominant hand (hitting the drum head directly). With the non-dominant hand, for