In Morse Code on Drums
Not showing the text for this one. It's an exercise for any who might like to attempt reading by ear or copying by hand. Three operators are simulated by callsign, drum tone, and slight variances in speed. There is normal call and response. The banter is deliberately humorous, paralleling normal ham dialogs. The average speed overall for this file is 16.6 wpm. Have fun.
About the volume ... it's actually on full. But the tones are quite low, and laptop speakers don't handle the drums so very well. I recommend headphones.
My next go at this (if there is one) will be including simulated QRN by way of nature sounds: birds, bees, wind ... and if I want to be mean, distant thunder. This first one is pure, though.
The above MP3 was generated via Perl using free *.wav samples found on-line. This file is the 3rd in sequence by time generated. It took me a lot more effort than the prior two (poems on bongos and bells), owing to the differences in speed of each simulated operator. That required me embedding flags into the text, and teaching Perl to interpret them, thus to switch tone sets, plus adjust timing alignments. To allow for sustain (tone overlap) Perl generates for mono channels, which I then mix into one using Audacity. In other words, a bit of bother, done mostly during my free time on the 2018 Thanksgiving holiday. Similarly, I have two other such MP3s, both much longer, each presenting a famous poem: bongos & bells
Blatantly plagiarizing from a post on QRZ.net, I here quote ham operator KL7AJ, who commented:
Some missionary friends came back from the former Belgian Congo with a "7-tone drum", commonly used for communication across vast swaths of African wilderness. The drum was a perfect exponential horn....sort of like what you'd find in an Altec-Lansing speaker cabinet. How in tarnation some tribal dude in Belgian Congo figured out the exponential horn is beyond me.....had to have been alien technology...."The God's Must have been Crazy" sort of thing.
Anyway, my friend was describing how EFFICIENT and compressed "drum language" is.....they can communicate VERY complex message traffic with surprisingly few beats. I wonder if the "seven tones" are ASCII bits.
And here is a link where you can watch a guy called Vadrum, actually playing Morse on drums: YouTube .