Wes­ley Gib­bings

Dr Sav­it­ri Ram­per­sad’s May 22 launch of Steel­pan Vi­bra­tions: Un­lock­ing the Hu­man Mind in­tro­duced a NA­PA au­di­ence to a nov­el, thought-pro­vok­ing view of the steel­pan’s unique val­ue.

Cul­tur­al ac­tivist and archivist Dr Rudolph Ot­t­ley, who su­per­vised Ram­per­sad’s PhD at UTT, said the book “takes us away from the small talk … and the rum-shop talk, but to deal with an area of the pan where we talk about the hu­man im­pact.”

Ot­t­ley ex­plained the book ex­am­ines “how this in­stru­ment im­pacts us as hu­man be­ings, emo­tion­al­ly and oth­er­wise. Why we sit in Panora­ma and then we jump, and then we leave Panora­ma and walk down the road, very sad or very hyped. What caus­es that.”

The au­thor de­scribed her own first strong emo­tion­al en­counter with the in­stru­ment in De­cem­ber 2001: “The pan drum got a hold of me.” She re­called tak­ing a pan home, wrap­ping it up, pick­ing up her sticks and be­ing amazed by the sound. “When I played any one note, I heard this; I felt the wave of the sound com­ing up to­wards me.”

Lat­er, in her stud­ies, she pur­sued a sci­en­tif­ic ba­sis for her be­lief that the sound - not on­ly the mu­sic - of the pan con­tains fea­tures that can con­tribute to hu­man well­ness. In Steel­pan Vi­bra­tions, she ar­gues that, at a per­son­al lev­el, “in­ter­act­ing with the in­stru­ment … can pos­i­tive­ly in­flu­ence the way you are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing your life.”

Her for­mer sec­ondary school teacher, en­vi­ron­men­tal ac­tivist Claire Wat­son, told the NA­PA au­di­ence: “The steel band is more than just an in­stru­ment; it is our na­tion­al voice.”

Born from re­silience and cre­ativ­i­ty, Wat­son said, the in­stru­ment was trans­formed from dis­card­ed ma­te­ri­als in­to some­thing ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing “some of the most up­lift­ing and soul­ful sounds in the world.”

“Now,” she added, “through this book, we are in­vit­ed to see the steel band not on­ly as a sym­bol of cul­ture and iden­ti­ty, but as a tool for heal­ing.”

Ram­per­sad of­fers eight chap­ters of text, pho­tographs, and il­lus­tra­tions to sup­port her claim about the in­stru­ment’s heal­ing po­ten­tial. The book fo­cus­es less on per­son­al mem­oir and more on a sci­en­tif­ic method­ol­o­gy for re­search­ing “the steel­pan sound, cog­ni­tion and emo­tion­al in­ter­play, and adult well­ness.”

Chap­ters in­clude “Sound De­vel­op­ment in Pan,” a dis­cus­sion of the com­mon be­lief that pan vi­bra­tions “are a force of its own,” a the­o­ret­i­cal overview, an ex­ten­sive lit­er­a­ture re­view, and a sec­tion lay­ing out con­cep­tu­al and op­er­a­tional frame­works (“Lay­ing Out the Ter­rain”).

The book presents and analy­ses the study’s da­ta, ex­am­ines “The Pan Sound Ef­fect” in re­la­tion to the re­search ques­tions, and fin­ish­es with a dis­cus­sion of find­ings and con­clu­sions.

Most of the ma­te­r­i­al is ac­ces­si­ble to new­com­ers. How­ev­er, the link be­tween sound (here from a mu­si­cal in­stru­ment) and hu­man be­hav­iour and the au­thor’s philo­soph­i­cal back­ground, re­quire some dis­sect­ing.

“Sound,” Ram­per­sad writes in the in­tro­duc­tion, “is an in­de­pen­dent force, vi­brat­ing through us, our voic­es, our thoughts, our body’s sound. We are the ve­hi­cles for the man­i­fes­ta­tion of Sound with­in this uni­verse.”

At the launch, Wat­son did not sound scep­ti­cal: “In a world where stress, chron­ic pain, and emo­tion­al fa­tigue are in­creas­ing­ly com­mon, this book of­fers some­thing both time­ly and time­less. It re­minds us that heal­ing can be cre­ative, it can be mu­si­cal, and it can come right from here, from in­stru­ments and tra­di­tions born in our own Caribbean soil.”

Ot­t­ley of­fered a wider per­spec­tive: “It’s more than just a steel band book. It’s a book about us.”

Ram­per­sad’s COVID-19 lock­down fo­cus-group ses­sions sup­plied much of the em­pir­i­cal ma­te­r­i­al she presents as ev­i­dence, through sci­ence, of the pow­er of art - in this case, the sound of the steel­pan.

The launch was at­tend­ed by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the In­di­an and Japan­ese diplo­mat­ic corps, Pan Trin­ba­go, au­thor Earl Lovelace, artist Dr James Arm­strong, and oth­er mem­bers of the arts and en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try.

Read­ers should keep its cen­tral claim in mind: the steel­pan’s sound can in­flu­ence hu­man well­be­ing. Its val­ue ex­tends be­yond the mu­sic, steel­band cul­ture, and all that sur­rounds its evo­lu­tion and growth.

All 130 pages are in­tend­ed to be read with that premise.