African music is as vast and varied as the continent's many nations and ethnic groups, so a general description of African music is not possible. Although there is no distinctly pan-African music, there are shared forms of musical expression, and regional similarities between dissimilar groups.

The music and dance forms of the African diaspora (many Caribbean and Latin American music genres like rumba and salsa, as well as African American music) were founded to varying degrees on musical traditions from Africa, taken there by African slaves.

Some musical genres of Northern Africa, Northeast Africa and the islands off the East African coast share both traditional African and Middle Eastern features.

Rhythmic complexity
Sub-Saharan music has as its special feature a rhythmic music that has spread to other regions especially to the Americas. The unique way of African polyrhythm is the discernible coherence of the African rhythmic pattern.

Scales and Polyphony
Scale systems spread through regions, there are diatonic scales, but other forms pentatonic scales are also widespread. The music are mostly different from those found in European music.
Pitch polyphony exists in the form of two musics (generally thirds, fourths, and fifths), overlapping choral antiphony and solo-choral response, and usually different kinds of melodies.

Musical instruments
Besides using the voice, a wide array of musical instruments are used. African musical instruments include a wide array of drums, slit gongs, rattles, double balls as well as melodic instruments like string instruments (musical bows, different types of harps and harp-like instruments like the Kora as well as fiddles), many types of xylophone and lamellophone such as the mbira and different types of wind instrument like flutes and trumpets.

Drums used in African traditional music include tama talking drums, bougarabou and djembe in West Africa, water drums in Central and West Africa, and different types of drums are often called engoma or ngoma in Central and Southern Africa.

During colonial times, European instruments such as saxophones, trumpets, and guitars were adopted by many African musicians; their sounds were integrated into the traditional patterns and are widely used in African popular music.

Timbre
In many African music cultures, there is a preference for "noisy" timbres. For example, on the ennanga harp, scales of a kind of goana are fixed on the instrument in such a way that the vibrating strings will touch it. This gives a crackling timbre to the sound. Another example are membranes made from spider webs attached to the openings of calabash resonators in some types of xylophones. In singing, one can often also meet raspy or rough timbres very unlike the voice ideal of western music.

Relationship to language
Many African Languages are tonal languages. In many African cultures, this leads to a close connection between music and language. In singing, the tonal pattern or the text puts some constraints on the melodic patterns. On the other hand, in instrumental music, a native speaker of a language can often perceive a text or texts in the music. This effect also forms the basis of drum languages (talking drums).

Relationship to dance
The treatment of "music" and "dance" as separate art forms is an European idea. In many African languages there is no concept corresponding exactly to these terms. For example, in many Bantu languages, there is one concept that might be translated as "song" and another that covers both the semantic fields of the European concepts of "music" and "dance". So there is one word for both music and dance (the exact meaning of the concepts may differ from culture to culture).

For example, in Kiswahili, the word "ngoma" may be translated as "drum", "dance", "dance event", "dance celebration" or "music", depending on the context. Each of these translations is incomplete.
Therefore, from an intracultural point of view, African music and African dance must be viewed in very close connection. The classification of the phenomena of this area of culture into "music" and "dance" is foreign to many African cultures.

Traditional music
A lot of African traditional music is or was performed by professional musicians. Some of it is courtly music or sacral music. Therefore, the term "folk" music is not always appropriate. Nevertheless, both the terms "folk music" and "traditional music" can be found in the literature.

African folk music and traditional music is mostly functional in nature. There are, for example, many different kinds of work songs, ceremonial or religious music and courtly music performed at royal courts, but none of these are performed outside of their intended social context.

Music is highly functional in African ethnic life, accompanying birth, marriage, hunting, and even political activities. Similarities with other cultures, particularly Indian and Middle Eastern, can be ascribed primarily to the spread of Islam.