Royal Society Open Science has a super interesting new publication showing how the Amazonian Bora people use drums to communicate across long distances.
This is more than just a morse code style of communication: The drum patterns closely match their language. Small variations in the beat placement match how their words are vocalized, to create sentences that travel much farther than the human voice. Compared to shouting, the sound of their drums can travel up to 10 times the distance.
Check out the video below to see it in action. Read the RSOS paper here, or check out a more digestible article from Science Mag here.