ABSTRACT
Music permeates the daily life of people in Africa. The East African beni and West African highlife draw upon brass-band music. The Congolese soukous echoes soul and disco music. The South African makwaya joins European vocal harmonies and American ragtime elements with Xhosa rhythms. Sound is a favored sense for experience in many African communities. African performers generally favor complex timbres or tone colors, which musicians often create by adding rattles to drums, zithers, and mbira. Music in Africa may stir people to dance if they hear drums or to become calm if they are grieving. African peoples categorize instruments in ways that differ somewhat from the Western orchestral categories of string, woodwind, brass, and percussion sections. Music in Africa today accompanies a wide variety of events, involving dazzling arrays of instruments, costumes, movements, and forms and sometimes juxtaposing the old and the new; a carved goblet drum may be played alongside a synthesizer or an electric guitar.
