Tud-om starts with an introductory section called adudungan. This is the segment where pity is emoted. [To listen to the song, click on the underlined “Music transcription” above.] The length of this  section varies from singer to singer. Manobos describe this introductory segment as a preparatory tuning-up (literally, "equalizing" or angay-angay), an observation that is obviously marked by a long, continuous melisma. This section wanders listlessly around segundal melodic intervals; tud-om always has hemitonic tonality. In terms of music function, the vocal sonority of the introductory adudungan is an initiatory move that is musically necessary for the singer to find the tonality of the piece. The introduction leads to a short segment in high register (te-ak) which "opens," loudens or "brightens" (mayagting) the sound, giving the song a clearer articulation of tonality based on intervals of fourths (tetrachords), a wider sound envelope, an embracing luminousity of melodic intervallic steps and skips, albeit the intelligibility of the words is obliterated, dismembered or “killed” so to speak.

The initiatory musical gesture has a small ambitus uttering linguistic particles but as it gradually expands to a wide ambitus of the tune (tonada), reaching that section in high register (te-ak) just mentioned, strongly-emoted words, now ruptured by the tonal pathos, are released. It is this tonal movement that encapsulates the poeisis of pity, a pathogenic vocal gesture of endearment. The high register will be repeated continually throughout the piece, serving as a phatic boundary marker, again serving as an adudungan, ending and beginning "speech paragraphs" with passion. “Speech paragraphs” which comprise the bulk of the song are syllabic. They are normatively anhemitonic (no semitones), using minimal set of tones, and in low register. I use “speech paragraphs” because verses in tud-om are not governed by meter nor quantification of syllables. Rather it is governed by a rhythm specific to a speaking in pairs or couplets. Musically speaking, both the introductory and speech paragraph marker adudungans focus on embodied sentiments, on the materiality of the musical communication that contrasts with speech paragraphs that focus on words or logos instead. In the melodic effusion, one is reminded of the phenomenal bodily voice-object that Carolyn Abbate talked about in her popular book Unsung Voices (1991). In contrast to her findings, however, Manobo adudungan is communicatively functional in the keying of a gnostic message, i.e., the foregrounding of the act of facing another other sentient being—a person or a spirit. In the mythic narrative and ritual, characters intimate with one another. This intimacy, an effect that comes about in the act of revealing, disclosing, or externalizing one’s ginhawa (nawnangen) to a person or spirit is what makes the adudungan quite compelling as a humanly-sensible sound object.

Music Transcription