Clapstick

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Clapsticks, also spelt clap sticks and also known as bilma, bimli, clappers, musicstick or just stick, are a traditional Australian Aboriginal instrument. They serve to maintain rhythm in voice chants, often as part of an Aboriginal ceremony.^[1]

They are a type of drumstick, percussion mallet or claves that belongs to the idiophone category. Unlike drumsticks, which are generally used to strike a drum, clapsticks are intended for striking one stick on another.

In northern Australia, clapsticks would traditionally accompany the didgeridoo, and are called bimli or bilma by the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Boomerang clapsticks are similar to regular clapsticks but they can be shaken for a rattling sound or be clapped together.

The usual technique employed when using clapsticks is to clap the sticks together to create a rhythm that goes along with the song.

• Clapper (musical instrument)
• Clapper stick

• A survey of traditional south-eastern Australian Indigenous music by Barry McDonald (book chapter)
• Moyle, Alice M. (1978). Aboriginal Sound Instruments (PDF). Aboriginal SoundInstrumentsAlice M MoyleCompanion Booklet for a CompaCt DisCAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. ISBN 9781922059468.
• "Clapsticks". University of Melbourne. 21 June 2017.
• "1788 - Meet Waruwi: Clapping sticks". My Place. Australian Broadcasting Corporation/. 24 December 1999.
• Curkpatrick, Samuel. "Productive Ambiguity: Fleshing out the Bones in Yolŋu Manikay" Song" Performance, and the Australian Art Orchestra’s" Crossing Roper Bar"." Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 9, no. 2 (2013)[1]

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