African music is often considered to be essentially percussive music, with the interplay of rhythms as its most fundamental feature. This is, however, an overstatement: Although it’s more difficult for Western ears to pick out, melody is just as important an element as rhythm. We don’t normally think of drums or other percussion instruments as carrying melodies, but in parts of Africa the relationship between music and speech is so close that drums are often used as melodic, almost
“singing” instruments. Since many of the languages in West Africa are based on the inflection or pitch of the voice as well as on the particular configuration of vowels and consonants, a drum can “talk” by imitating the speech patterns of the language. When one pitch pattern can apply to several words, the drummer will add another phrase to clarify which word is being imitated. As Ghanaian melodies are also based on these speech inflections, the pattern of the talking drum can serve both as rhythm and melody.
