MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS OF AFRICA

African Music incorporates all the major instrumental genres of Western Music, including
strings, winds and percussion, along with a tremendous variety of specific African musical
instruments for solo or ensemble playing.

Classifications of Traditional African Instruments

A. Idiophones – These are percussion instruments that are either struck with a mallet or
against one another.
1. Balafon – is a West African xylophone.
2. Rattles – are vessels made of seashells, tin, basketry, animal hoofs, horn, wood, meal,
cocoons, palm kernels, or tortoise shells.
3. Agogo – is a single bell or multiple bells that had its origins in traditional Yoruba
music.
4. Atingting kon – are slit gongs used as communication between villages.
5. Slit Drum – is a hollow percussion instrument.
6. Djembe – is one of the best – known African drums.
7. Shekere – is a type of gourd and shell megaphone from West Africa, consisting of a
dried gourd with beads woven into a net covering the gourd.
8. Rasp – is a hand percussion instrument whose sound is produced by scraping the
notches on a piece of wood.
B. Membranophones – are instruments, usually drums, which have vibrating animal
membranes.
1. Body Percussion – African People frequently use their bodies as musical instruments.
2. Talking Drum – is used to send messages to announce births, deaths, marriages,
sporting events, dances, initiation or war.
C. Lamellaphone – is a set of plucked tounges or keys mounted on a sound board.
1. Mbira – is from Zimbabwe that is used throughout the continent.
D. Chordophones – are instruments which produce sounds from the vibration of strings.
1. Musical Bow – is the ancestor of all string instruments.
2. Lute – originating from the Arabic states, is shaped like the modern guitar and played
in similar fashion.
3. Kora – is Africa’s most sophistiscated harp, while also having features similar to a
lute.
4. Zither – is a stringed instrument with varying sizes and shapes whose strings are
stretched along its body.
5. Zeze – is a fiddle from Sub – Saharan Africa with a bow, a small wooden stick, or
plucked with the fingers.
E. Aerophones – are musical instruments that produce sound primarily by trapping or
enclosing a body or column of air and causiong it to vibrate.
1. Flutes – are widely used throughout Africa.
2. Horns – are found almost everywhere in Africa, and are commonly made from
elephant tusks and animal horns.
3. Reed Pipes – These are single – reed pipes made from hollow guinea corn or sorghum
stems, where the reed is a flap partially cut from the stem near one end.
4. Whistles – are found throughout the continent and may be made of wood or other
materials.
5. Trumpets – are made of wood, metal, animal horns, elephant tusks, and gourds,
ornamented with snake or crocodile skin or the hide of zebras, leopards, and other
animals.