This is a basic research project that deals with the production and exchange of bronze/brass gongs and bamboo/wood instruments and of traditional verbal arts among coastal Moslem Maguindanaon peoples on one hand and the highland groups on the other such as the non-Moslem Teduray, Manobo Dulangan, and Blaan. The distribution of gongs and bamboo instruments and diffusion of verbal arts in a landscape indicate patterns of cross-cultural relations and intercultural symbiosis between the two major groups. These exchanges in music are crucial to the groups' adaptation to the varying physical and social ecologies. In the study, I will map out where musical instrument bossed gongs are made, where they are traded and for what social meanings, and how these trading routes may reveal older patterns of sedentarization, movements of people within and outside the provinces of Maguindanao and the two Cotabatos. I will also include a mapping of traditional verbals arts (spoken or sung) and do intensive ethnographic interviewing concerning musics’ social functions and practices. It will examine the changing "lives of these objects" among the peoples who use them through time, thus tracing the pathways of their diffusion in particular geo-political spaces. This study concerns the area in Lake Buluan, the source of Pulangi River, which empties to Cotabato City on one side and which is opposite to another route that is in Sarangani Bay. Because the main group of people in the Philippines comes from the Austronesian language stock, this study will provide clues to a resilient lowland-highland social co-existence based on reciprocal socio-economic ties that have existed for a very long time. These music instruments are compelling evidences of fluid and unbounded social exchanges since at least the Austronesians entered Mindanao via Butuan River. By mapping the flows of gongs and bamboo instruments in Maguindanao, one appreciates the cultural flows of ideas, goods, and peoples in an important but less studied part of our archipelago.