A Nigerian professor has proposed drones built to play sacred Yoruba talking drum rhythms, preserving the 256 Odu Ifa divination texts as digital code.
Professor Ojo Emmanuel Ademola, an academic in cybersecurity and information technology management, outlined the idea in an essay titled “Drumming Drones in the Digital Age.” He argues that the dundun, the Yoruba talking drum, works as a coded language built into the verses and patterns that make up the Odu Ifa, the corpus at the center of Ifa divination.
The proposal treats each of the 256 Odu as a rhythmic sequence. Engineers could translate each one into binary data, he says, then map it onto drum strokes, tempo and tone. A drone carrying sound modules and motion sensors could reproduce the sequences on demand, responding to ritual cues or audience interaction rather than playing a fixed recording.
Ademola writes that drumming in this context “is not merely aesthetic; it is a language,” tied to spiritual meaning rather than performance alone.
The idea carries weight for Yoruba communities watching oral knowledge thin out as elders who hold it age without trained successors in place. Ifa transmission has historically run through years of apprenticeship, and Ademola argues that a digital record of the rhythms could outlast any single lineage of drummers.
This is not Ademola’s first attempt at the idea. He raised the broader concept of digitising the Odu Ifa corpus in a BusinessDay Nigeria opinion piece in March, which proposed using drones to archive endangered oral knowledge without replacing the custodians who interpret it. The new essay moves the argument from storage into live performance, casting the drone as an active participant in ritual and education rather than a passive archive.
He also names the catch in his own proposal. Drumming in Yoruba tradition carries spiritual weight tied to lineage and initiation, and he writes that any use in ceremonies would need agreement from Babalawos, drummers and other cultural custodians before deployment. He positions the technology as a complement to human drummers, aimed at education, diaspora communities and museum installations rather than as a substitute for trained practitioners.
No prototype exists yet. Drone platforms already carry audio playback hardware, and robotic percussion systems have shown that automated drumming works on its own, but no one has combined the two with an accurate Odu Ifa rhythm library, according to the essay. Ademola says the next step is building a database of rhythms tied to each Odu and training models on recordings from master drummers, work he says needs cultural institutions and spiritual leaders involved alongside engineers.
Whether the idea reaches a working prototype will depend on funding, and on whether the traditional authorities whose support Ademola says is required choose to take part in shaping how, or whether, drones get a role in ceremonies that have stayed in human hands for generations.
