Since people in so many places used gourds for everyday containers, many groups also invented musical instruments made out of gourds. For example, many different cultures, particularly African and native American peoples, made maraca-like rattles which were basically dried gourds with pebbles, seeds, or other small objects rattling around inside them. Some African peoples also invented a sort of inside-out rattle, with beads in a net rattling against the outside of the gourd. The Nigerian
shekere is the best-known of this type of rattle, but many similar instruments with different names are popular in other places in Africa.
Actually, the easiest way to use a gourd as a musical instrument is to simply play a dried empty gourd by tapping or slapping it, or even beating it against a hand or on the ground. In some musical traditions (particularly in Peru, Cuba, and Puerto Rico), a stick is used to scrape against ridges carved into the gourd. Because the gourd has a wood-like stiffness that vibrates well, as well as a hollow space inside, dried gourds have a natural
resonance that creates a a variety of pleasant and interesting
percussion sounds when it is tapped, beaten, or scraped.
If you can, pass around a few sturdy dried gourds, letting the students see how wooden they feel, and letting them see what kinds of sounds they make when tapped with fingers, fingernails, drum sticks, pencils, or the palm of a hand.
This very simple type of "drum" (actually technically an
idiophone ) has also been used as an instrument in many different cultures around the world. And some cultures make true drums (
membranophone ) by cutting off the top of a gourd and stretching an animal skin tightly across the opening. Probably the most famous kind of gourd drum is the Hawaiian
ipu heke , an idiophone-type drum made from two gourds attached to each other to form a sort of hourglass shape.
That natural resonance is also very useful in other types of instruments. Many modern instruments include a wooden box as part of the body of the instrument. The wooden box may be decorated, or have a very fancy shape, but looking pretty is not its most important function. The vibrations of the wooden box and of the air inside the box make the instrument sound much louder. They also refine the sound, making it prettier or more interesting, and basically producing the characteristic sound of the instrument, which is not at all the same sound that, for example, an unamplified string would make. (See
timbre ,
resonance ,
Sound and Music ,
Standing Waves and Musical Instruments , and
Standing Waves and Wind Instruments for more on this.)
You may want to ask the students if they can name some of these wooden-box instruments, for example guitar, violin, and piano.
Since a gourd is very much like a ready-made wooden box, it has been used for the body of many different kinds of instruments. For example:
- Many banjos, lutes, and other stringed instruments around the world have been made using a gourd for their bodies.The
kora , for example, is an instrument related to both the lute and the harp, with a body made from half of a large gourd. The
kora is the main instrument of the
griot s, the professional storyteller-historian-musicians of West African Mandinka communities.
- Various types of
lamellophones (sometimes called "thumb-pianos) are popular all over sub-Saharan Africa. The plucked metal keys which most lamellophones use to produce their sound are not very loud, and many types use gourd resonators either as the main body of the instrument, or as an extra resonator. The Zimbabwean
mbira , for example, is traditionally placed inside a large gourd-half, in order to amplify its sound during performances.
- Many traditional cultures around the world also have an instrument in the
musical bow family. (Picture a string stretched from one end of a curved stick to the other, much as the string in an arrow-launching bow, but used to make music instead.) In some places, the musical bow usually includes an attached gourd resonator. The most widely known instrument in this category is the
berimbau , which is played in Brazil to accompany
capoeira , a unique tradition incorporating elements of both dance and martial arts.
- The
sitar , a well-known stringed instruments from India, uses a gourd as its body, plus an extra gourd resonator attached to the neck of the instrument.
- Some
wind instruments are also partly made from gourds, so that at some point the air being blown through the instrument passes through the gourd. These include both
brass -type (lip reed) "horns" and
woodwind -type reed instruments. Perhaps the best-known instrument in this category is the
tiktiri , the clarinet-like instrument from India that many Westerner's associate with snake-charmers.
