Copyright © 2003, 2001 by Michael Segers, All rights reserved
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The
Digital Didj
Growing old is not for sissies....
This is not a rave about old people, however, but about an old
musical instrument, the didgeridoo, a creation of the Australian aborigines,
which some people claim is the oldest known wind instrument in the world today.
As I grow older, my triumphs grow fewer and smaller but, because of
that, even more cherished. Improbably,
this time, I’m celebrating a minor triumph, performing a didgeridoo solo, but more
believably also celebrating yet another way in which the Internet has enriched
my life.
I
was in one of those antique shops that more honestly should be called junk
shops, well, maybe by a stretch of imagination, junque
shops. Besides its “antiques”
of doubtful age, this one was cluttered with cheap handicrafts from
Indonesia. Just as I was leaving, I
saw, leaning against the doorframe, a hollow
wooden tube about a yard long. I
picked it up and asked the clerk if I could blow the didj.
She shrugged, wordless, and after wiping it off, I held the tube to my
mouth. Sometimes, when I blow my
own didj, I start with a sputtering, messy sound, but this time, I produced a
clean, even drone. The clerk looked surprised.
"You're the first person that ever got a sound out of it," she
said. Now, it was my turn to shrug,
but I added, "I owe it all to
the… Internet."
Some
months before, I had found some didgeridoos in a flea market—the first time
I had ever seen one of the instruments which I had marveled at on a couple of
CD's. The didj is a very simple
object—really just a wooden tube. The
traditional Australian aboriginal didj is made from a small tree trunk hollowed
out by termites, but those at the flea market were from Indonesia and made of
bamboo, and the one in the antique shop was of thick carved wood.
I started to buy one at the flea market, but at that time, I didn't have
a clue to how to play it.
But
I went home and soon found quite a few didj links on the Internet, even an
assortment of instruments as well as instructional books and videos on eBay. It is an elegantly simply instrument to play: one presses
one's mouth to the mouthpiece and blows a “raspberry”—maybe not so
elegant, after all. The tube
resonates and amplifies the sound. The didj has no holes, stops, keys, valves,
slides or anything else. In five
minutes you can learn how to get the basic drone, but I suppose you could spend
a lifetime learning the breathing techniques and the movements of lips and
tongue used to create various sounds.
In a couple of weeks, I owned a video and a book and a couple of weeks
later, I bought my didjeridoo—a bamboo one.
(You can try this at home, with a piece of PVC pipe or even a cardboard
tube.) After watching the video a
couple of times, I took a deep breath and produced
a noise which made me wonder if didjerido
means "sounds like the kangaroos have been in the beans."
Very soon, however, I got my low, even drone and discovered that the
mysterious didj does indeed have a healing effect: it vibrates so strongly that
it can open your sinuses.
Simple as it is, there is a good bit of controversy about the didj.
For starters, how do you spell it? That,
of course, can be a problem with search engines.
One day on Google, for instance, I entered several variations and came up
with a wide range of links for each:
didgeridou
- 36
didjeridou
-
105
didgeridu
- 1,060
didjeridoo
- 7,550
didjeridu
- 10,100
didgeridoo
- 34,800
Not
only does this suggest that the didj is well-established in cyberspace but also
that lexicographers have a new way to explore word uses and spellings.
Actually,
the word is not of aboriginal origin but seems to have been used, perhaps
mockingly, by whites. Among the
aboriginal names for the instrument,
yirdaki (represented on Google
by 112 links) seems to be preferred.
Then,
there is the issue of whether we "whitefellas" (as the aborigines call
folks like me) should play the instrument at all, since it is part of the whole
complex and largely hidden culture of the aborigines. In aboriginal society, by
the way, women do not play the didj. The truth is, when I sit on my porch blowing my didj, I am
not trying to usurp anyone’s culture. For
me, it is a simple but intriguing way to relax. The R&R cats
are terrified, but the R&R parrot sits
on my shoulder unfazed. I had hoped
to join in on the frog chorus that echoes from the pond, but the first sound of
the didj silences it.
Of course, this article is as much about the Internet as about the didj
itself. Two of the most thorough
didj sites offer varying spellings:
As much as I enjoy and appreciate the Internet, sometimes I wonder if the
world is not opening up too much and too fast.
Is there any culture that we can’t dabble with from the comfort of our
desks? Are we getting too much
information? Just this morning, a
hawk landed in my back yard, and in five minutes, I was sending a digital photo
of the bird to friends from Seattle to Tampa.
Throughout our history, we have been given warning stories about the
danger of too much knowledge. How
about Faustus and
Frankenstein
for starters?
Maybe life would be easier if I were a simple aborigine or wannabe,
languidly stoking new sounds out of my didj, dreaming of an Australia that
I’ve never seen, well, except when the Sidney Olympics were on television last summer,
and, of course, there’s Crocodile Dundee,
and how could I forget my all-time favorite film, Picnic at Hanging Rock?
Keep
your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, your search engines open to a
wide range of spellings, and, if you ever find your mouth pressed tightly to the
mouthpiece of a didj, I’ve found it helps to have your bottom lip protrude a
little beyond your upper lip.
Rovin' on the Internet: Online Adventures