Life at sea has always demanded more than physical strength. It requires coordination, endurance, trust, and a deep awareness of one’s surroundings. Across maritime cultures, music has emerged not as a luxury or diversion, but as a practical and emotional companion to labour. From rowing chants and work songs to sea shanties and rhythmic calls, sound has long helped sailors move together, work together, and endure conditions that are often unpredictable and unforgiving.
When people think of maritime music, European sea shanties usually come to mind, the call-and-response songs of the Atlantic or Mediterranean, sung on long voyages and preserved in songbooks and recordings. These traditions have been widely studied and celebrated. Far less attention, however, has been paid to the musical cultures of the Middle East, particularly those along the southern coasts of Iran, where seafaring life has been shaped by very different environmental realities.
Spending time thinking about these traditions reveals something striking: the sound of maritime music is not only cultural, but environmental. Climate, materials, and the physical conditions of work at sea all leave their mark on how music is made, heard, and remembered.
– Music as Work, Not Performance
At sea, music is rarely separate from labour. Historically, work songs functioned as tools. In European contexts, shanties helped crews haul sails, raise anchors, row in unison, or pump water from the hull. Rhythm regulated effort. Song structured time. Even within strict hierarchies aboard ships, these musical moments allowed space for humour, complaint, nostalgia, and shared humanity.
A similar logic operates in Middle Eastern maritime traditions. Along the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, music accompanied pearl diving, net hauling, rowing, and navigation. These songs were not sung for an audience; they were sung for survival. Repetition and pulse helped workers maintain stamina in extreme heat, while shared rhythm reinforced communal bonds and collective responsibility.
In southern Iran, many of these maritime songs, often referred to as neymeh, zarbandi, or work chants, are deeply rhythmic. Unlike many European shanties, they tend to prioritise pulse over melody. This is not a lack of musicality, but a reflection of function. Here, music is not layered on top of labour; it is woven into it. Sound becomes an extension of movement, breath, and physical effort.
– Climate Shapes Sound
The southern Iranian coast is one of the most climatically demanding regions in which people have sustained maritime traditions. Summer temperatures regularly exceed 45°C, humidity is high, and seasonal winds can turn calm waters into rough seas with little warning. These conditions affect everything, including music.
In such an environment, melodic instruments, especially wooden stringed ones, struggle. High humidity causes wood to absorb moisture, increasing its mass and changing its internal structure. From an acoustic perspective, this alters how vibrations travel through the instrument. Moisture increases internal damping, meaning sound energy is absorbed by the material rather than projected outward. The result is shorter sustain, reduced volume, and less clarity.
On an open deck, surrounded by wind, waves, and the noise of physical labour, these losses matter. A delicate melodic line simply cannot compete with the soundscape of the sea. Over time, this makes certain instruments impractical, no matter how culturally valued they may be elsewhere.
Percussion instruments, by contrast, thrive in these conditions.
– Why Percussion Dominates at Sea
Drums such as the damam, dohol, and tonbak are well suited to harsh maritime environments. Their sound is built on strong, transient attacks rather than sustained resonance. Low-frequency rhythms travel further across open spaces and remain audible through wind and waves. Unlike wooden soundboards, drum membranes, often made from animal skin, can be adjusted quickly. Musicians can tighten, warm, or dry them to compensate for humidity-induced slackening.
This adaptability is crucial at sea, where conditions change constantly. Percussion offers clarity, durability, and authority. It cuts through noise. It anchors movement. It keeps bodies working together.
Over generations, these practical advantages became cultural habits. What begins as necessity turns into tradition. Rhythm becomes identity.
– Hearing Music at Sea
Music at sea is not experienced as a separate object. It blends into everything else: the creak of wood, the slap of waves, the rush of wind, the heat pressing down on the body. Sound is felt as much as it is heard.
From a phenomenological perspective, listening here is embodied. Sailors do not stand still and “consume” music. They hear through movement, fatigue, and exertion. Rhythm aligns with breath and muscle. The body becomes part of the sound.
In southern Iranian maritime contexts, this embodied listening helps explain the emphasis on steady, repetitive rhythms. These patterns mirror physical motion and reduce perceived effort. Research in music psychology supports this: rhythmic synchronisation can improve efficiency and endurance during physical work. At sea, rhythm is not aesthetic decoration, it is a form of support.
– A Different Maritime World
European maritime music developed under different environmental and social conditions. Sailors in the Atlantic, North Sea, and Mediterranean encountered cold, wind, and long voyages, but humidity was generally lower, and music often took place below deck or during rest periods. These contexts allowed for a wider range of vocal and instrumental expression.
Fiddles, concertinas, and later accordions were common on ships and in ports. Call-and-response songs carried across decks without requiring extreme volume. Narrative lyrics flourished, preserving stories of travel, loss, longing, and home. Music could function as relief as much as labour.
The contrast is not a matter of superiority or complexity, but of context. Climate shapes not only instruments, but when, where, and why music is made.
– Materials Matter
The physics of sound helps clarify these differences. Sound depends on vibration, and vibration depends on material properties such as density, elasticity, and moisture content. In humid environments, wooden instruments experience increased internal damping, reducing resonance and stability.
Experimental studies show that woods commonly used in instrument making, such as spruce and rosewood, exhibit measurable changes in frequency response as humidity rises. Resonant peaks shift. Amplitudes decrease. For instruments like violins, guitars, setar, or tanbour, whose sound depends on stable vibrational behaviour, these changes can significantly affect tone and projection.
Percussion instruments avoid many of these problems. Their reliance on membrane vibration and low-frequency output makes them less vulnerable to atmospheric absorption. Wind and humidity attenuate high frequencies more rapidly than low ones, favouring bass-heavy sounds in open environments. Once again, environment quietly guides musical form.
– Culture in Motion
Of course, environment alone does not determine culture. Maritime music is also shaped by history, exchange, and movement. Southern Iranian port cities such as Bushehr and Bandar Abbas have long been sites of trade and migration. African, Arab, and South Asian musical elements intersect there, creating hybrid forms that carry traces of multiple worlds.
Seafaring music becomes a living archive — of labour, climate, travel, and encounter.
– Why This Matters Today
Many of these traditions now face decline. Mechanisation has changed maritime labour. Urbanisation has shifted cultural life inland. Climate change adds new pressures to already fragile ecosystems. Yet interest in maritime music is returning through documentation, performance, and cultural preservation.
Understanding the environmental logic behind these musical forms is essential. When music is separated from the conditions that shaped it, something vital is lost. Preserving rhythm without recognising heat, humidity, labour, and bodily experience risks turning living traditions into museum pieces.
Along the southern coasts of Iran, percussion-based maritime music is not simply folklore. It is a sophisticated response to life at sea — shaped by climate, materials, and human resilience.
– Listening Differently
Seafaring music reminds us that sound is never abstract. It is shaped by where we live, how we work, and what our bodies endure. Whether on the decks of European ships or the sun-soaked waters of the Persian Gulf, music has helped people move together through uncertainty.
To listen carefully to maritime music is to hear the sea itself, not just as backdrop, but as collaborator.
And perhaps that is its quiet lesson: culture, like sound, always carries the imprint of the world that produces it.
