In James Gleick's The Information, the first chapter is about a West African culture, turning phonemes, stressed and unstressed, into drumbeats, for conveyance

In James Gleick's The Information, the first chapter is about a West African culture, turning phonemes, stressed and unstressed, into drumbeats, for conveyance over longer distances than one could shout, and needing to compensate for the information-loss of sound into drum pulse by using longer and longer "phrases".