Hangaian slit drums

The Hangaian slit drums are a family of ideophones used in the Hangai-Litene area. They consist of a hollowed-out tree trunk or a length of bamboo with a slit in the middle, which is then hit with wooden sticks.

Traditional slit drums

Slit drums traditionally come in two varieties - a small one (cca 10-15 cm in length), which is handheld, sometimes can be found with a handle, and is probably the most commonly-used instrument in the area, and a large one, which can measure up to 2 m, is seated on the ground, and is commonly played by several people. This variety can also be connected to a ground resonator using a bamboo tube, amplifying its sound even more. This variety is mostly used in Hatoist rituals and ancestor tributes, and is commonly said to be older than the small variety, hence its association with ancestors. The Koma and Deoka people of Hangai play a special variety of this slit drum, which has one or two tongues (i.e. an U- or H-shaped slit), with each tongue traditionally being played by one person. If a drum has two tongues, they are tuned a minor third apart, as that is the interval between the two Koma/Deoka scale groups.

Modern slit drums

In the 1960s, some Litenean musicians have started experimenting with tuned slit drums, derived from the smaller variety. These slit drums were originally a group of five drums tuned to a pentatonic scale and originally supposed to be each held by one musician, who would thus only play one note, melodies being constructed by musicians taking their turns. Soon, however, these slit drums started being played by one person, being laid down on a log or a ground resonator. This innovation also facilitated their spread into Hangai. Nowadays, they're often laid on a metal framework, and are tuned chromatically, however many of the songs played are in various pentatonic scales. The Koma/Deoka tongued slit drum has also been pentatonicized, this however entailed a "splitting" of the traditional drum, with each tongue for each scale group, into two drums, one, smaller, for the higher scale group, and the other, bigger, for the lower. These modern drums are used recreationally, and are very popular in the K/D area, with every village having at least one set. They've also been adopted by some Hangaian slit drum ensembles as bass instruments, since the Litenean tuned drums are quite high-pitched. Other ensembles, however, use the ground resonator.