In the same session there was evidence that the students appropriated Josiane's strategy of investigating contrasts. Pierre suggested that the group create waveforms on the computer screen first for a drum stroke made by a stick and then for a drum stroke made by hand. Pierre then played a few hand strokes, which looked more like Figure 3. Drawing of MBL-generated wave form of a drum stroke made by hand. More evidence that the students were developing their own characterizations and understandings of what the sound wave inscriptions represented surfaced in the following conversation, in which the author asked Emmanuel about a waveform inscription he was holding.
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The students were working with a traditional Haitian rhythm, which they had dubbed with words. This practice, with roots in West Africa, made it possible to refer to the strokes without a lengthy description of the technique used to produce them. Each syllable of a word stood for one stroke on the drum. In a brief argument, the students used this speech genre to constrain a claim of what the inscription represented. His drawing signalled a triumphant return from the group's explorations with the drums and computer to the question of what features of sound the inscriptions represented and how they were represented.