Igbo ubo-aka : its role and music among the NRI people of Nigeria
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study attempts a socio-cultural approach to ubo-aka musical phenomena in terms of the role of the instrument as a communication medium with rich and varied tradition of its own among the Nri people in Igbo culture of south eastern Nigeria. The Igbo ubp-aka is a plucked idiophone consisting of eight metal prongs which are linguistically tuned with a bowl-shaped gourd resonator. This study is needed in the light of the important socio-cultural roles of ubp-aka musical tradition which are facing the prospect of extermination in the face of social change. The investigation rests primarily on my extensive field work in the music of Nri people from 1966 to 1975 and on current field recordings by Gwamniru Ezegbe and Levi Oji who are my research assistants from 1976 to 1977, in addition to current information on Nri culture from many Nri people. The first chapter introduces the whole thesis by presenting the method of investigation, the problems, the purpose, the academic reason for this study, literary survey and the scope of the study. Chapter 2 describes the Nri people and their culture as they relate to ubo-aka musical tradition. Chapter 3 is an organological study of the instrument based on the systems of Draeger and Hood. The determinants and the socio-cultural roles of ubq-aka music are discussed in ethnographic context which concludes the socio-cultural background to ubo-aka music. Chapter 5 discusses the transcriptions and the analyses using Professor Liang's "graphic space notation" specially designed for ubo-aka music. In the analyses, 30 musical examples that best typify ubo-aka musical tradition in Nri were selected and analyzed in terms of the musical parameters, linguistic content and social functions covering the characteristic scale-modes, the melodic contour typology, the intervalic structures, the correlation between the melodic contour and the speech tones and the rhythms of melody and speech. Chapter 6 concludes the study with recommendations and shows that (1) the melodic contours are linguistically determined by the Igbo tonal language, (2) the rhythms of melody and words do not always agree and (3) that the musical parameters can change but not the socio-cultural roles as defined by the society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".