Traditional African music’s three most common tone systems are the anhemitonic pentatonic scale, the heptatonic scale, and the overtone series (Agawu 2016). The map above identifies those systems as documented in sound recordings and visualizes them by their geographical regions.
Click on any point to see the recording citation and the tones and tone systems, which are color-coded:
purple = anhemitonic pentatonic scale
orange = heptatonic or seven-tone
green = overtone series
blue = none of the above
