These feasts were held to commemorate ancestors and were elaborate in preparation and ritual, neighbouring villages being invited and vast quantities of food consumed. House posts are another important art - to many carvers the most important part. They were and are generally made for either canoe or commemorative houses, those of the first being more concerned with Pacific religion and with a god demonstrating his special powers. The posts of commemoration tend to the secular and may illustrate legends, with unreined imagination, fishes and birds, or some event of note in the village. The same love of carving, often more detailed, is shown in the fishing floats and dancing sticks.
Music plays of course an important role in island life.
Livelier in tone are the bamboo pan-pipes, which have reached a remarkable development in the Solomons. They are often played in assemblies, particularly in Malaita, which preserves seven kinds of group with distinct polyphonic parts. Bamboo finds a further musical use in the stamping tubes, a complete set being ten, tuned to a pentatonic scale. These are sounded by impact on stones which produces a similar effect to the xylophone, one player being able to hold four in each hand, with the two lightest grasped by either big toe and hit on smaller stones. Another bamboo instrument is made from 25 large culms cleared of their joints, whose ends are struck with a coconut husk to produce a soft deep resonance.