Shamanic Music

Ancient music refers to the musical practices of the literate civilizations of antiquity (e.g., Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Levant, Persia, India, and China) before the medieval period. It is largely monophonic, text-driven, and modal, and survives today through a small corpus of notated fragments, theoretical treatises, iconography, and instrument remains. Its sound world is characterized by modal pitch systems (e.g., ancient Greek harmoniai built from tetrachords), rhythm tied to poetic meter, and timbres from lyres, harps, auloi (double-reed pipes), flutes, rattles/sistra, frame drums, and early lutes. Because authentic performance practice must be reconstructed, modern revivals rely on scholarship in archaeology, philology, and organology as much as on musical craft.

Religious music is music composed or performed for religious use, or created under clear religious influence. It often overlaps with ritual music—works sung or played during rites, ceremonies, and communal worship—and ranges from simple congregational chants to elaborate liturgical masses and devotional song traditions. Across cultures, religious songs have long served as a source of strength and consolation: easing pain, improving mood, fostering communal identity, and helping worshippers find meaning in suffering or joy. While styles vary widely between faiths and regions, many traditions share techniques such as call-and-response, intoned recitation, communal refrains, and the careful matching of text and musical accent to sacred language.

Indigenous American traditional music encompasses the ceremonial, social, and everyday musical practices of Native and Indigenous peoples throughout North, Central, and South America prior to and continuing after European contact. It is predominantly vocal and percussion-centered, featuring solo and group singing, vocables (non-lexical syllables), call-and-response, and cyclical song forms. Common instruments include frame and powwow drums, water drums, turtle-shell and gourd rattles, clapper sticks, log drums (teponaztli), and a wide family of flutes and aerophones such as the cedar/cane flute, quena, ocarina, and Andean panpipes (siku). Melodic systems vary widely by region, often employing tetratonic, pentatonic, and heptatonic pitch sets; Plains repertories frequently have descending contours, while Andean sikuri uses interlocking hocket textures. Music functions as living knowledge and embodied practice—tying story, language, dance, ceremony, and land. It is used for healing, prayer, rites of passage, communal celebration, diplomacy, and oral history, with stylistic diversity spanning the Arctic throat games (katajjaq), Great Basin paired-phrase songs, Pueblo ceremonial music, Plains powwow styles, Amazonian icaros, and Andean siku ensembles.

Central Asian music is a broad family of traditions shared across the Silk Road heartlands—today’s Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan, with strong ties to Uyghur, Pamiri, and other regional cultures. It blends Turkic nomadic song and epic recitation with Persianate courtly repertoire and Islamic modal theory, producing rich vocal melismas, intricate modal (maqom/maqam) systems, and cyclical rhythms (usul). Instrumentation centers on long‑necked lutes (dutar, tanbur, komuz, dombra), bowed fiddles (ghijak/kamancheh, qobyz), frame drums (doira/doyra), reed and woodwind instruments (surnay, nai), and zither or harp relatives (chang). Stylistically, it spans refined urban suites such as Shashmaqam to nomadic epic performance (akyn/jyrau/manaschi), wedding dance music driven by doira patterns, and intimate lyrical songs. Its timbral palette favors resonant plucked strings, bright double‑reed leads, and expressive, ornamented vocals.

Ritmada is a contemporary Brazilian dance-music style built around short, repetitive, resonant rhythmic loops. It favors immersive, highly danceable grooves that draw on Afro‑Brazilian percussion and timbres, but presents them with a cleaner, more radio-friendly production aesthetic. Compared to rougher street-oriented bass styles, ritmada typically places greater emphasis on sung or rapped lyrics and hook structure, while keeping the beat hypnotic and driving.

Throat singing is an umbrella term for several vocal practices found across the world in which singers deliberately excite and filter the harmonic (overtone) series above a sustained fundamental, often with a distinctly guttural or pressed tone. The result is the perception of more than one pitch at the same time: a drone-like low note plus a whistling, flute‑like harmonic melody. While best known from Inner Asia (e.g., Tuva and Mongolia), related practices also appear among Inuit communities in the Arctic (katajjaq), the Ainu (rekuhkara), and in parts of Siberia and elsewhere. Techniques and aesthetics vary by region, but common elements include a stable drone, overtone selection using precise shaping of the vocal tract, and close ties to landscape, animal mimicry, and ritual or communal functions.

Tuvan throat singing (khoomei) is a traditional vocal art from the Turkic-speaking people of Tuva in the Sayan–Altai region of southern Siberia. It is a biphonic technique in which a singer sustains a low drone (the fundamental) while shaping mouth, tongue, and throat to amplify specific overtones, producing the perception of multiple pitches at once. Distinct styles such as khoomei (soft, airy), sygyt (bright, whistling overtones), and kargyraa (deep, growling undertone) evoke the sounds of wind, rivers, and horse hooves and reflect a nomadic pastoral worldview. Performances often feature traditional instruments like the igil (two-string bowed fiddle), doshpuluur (lute), shoor (flute), and khomus (jaw harp), and can be either solo or ensemble-based.

Central Asian throat singing is a family of overtone-rich vocal techniques practiced across Mongolia, Tuva, and neighboring regions of Inner Asia. Singers shape the vocal tract to amplify specific harmonics above a low fundamental drone, producing the impression of two or more pitches at once. Traditionally performed by nomadic herders, these styles often imitate the sounds of wind, rivers, birds, and horses, and are closely tied to animist and steppe life-worlds. Substyles such as khöömii (overtone-focused), sygyt (whistling, high overtones), and kargyraa (very low, growling fundamentals) showcase distinctive timbral goals, breath control, and resonant vowel shaping. While deeply rooted in folk practice, throat singing has influenced contemporary ambient, drone, and experimental scenes, and it increasingly appears in cross-cultural collaborations and modern stage settings.

Joik (also spelled yoik; Northern Sámi: luohti; South Sámi: vuelie; Skolt Sámi: leu'dd) is an ancient Sámi vocal tradition from Sápmi in Northern Fennoscandia. It is typically an unaccompanied, highly personal chant that aims to evoke the essence of a person, animal, landscape, or event rather than to narrate it. Melodies are concise, built from small motifs, often modal or pentatonic, and rich in ornaments, glottal attacks, microtonal inflections, and flexible timbre. Joik can be free in meter or groove subtly around a pulse; historically it could be accompanied by the Sámi frame drum, though unaccompanied performance is common. Modern artists sometimes blend joik with folk, jazz, pop, ambient, or electronic textures while maintaining its distinctive vocal core.

Sámi music is the musical expression of the Indigenous Sámi people of Sápmi (northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia’s Kola Peninsula). At its heart is the joik (North Sámi: luohti; South Sámi: vuelie; Skolt Sámi: leu’dd; Inari Sámi: livđe) — a vocally driven tradition in which a person, place, animal, spirit, or moment is evoked rather than described. Joiks use short, motif-like phrases, vocables, flexible meter, and modal or pentatonic pitch collections. Traditional accompaniment includes the Sámi frame drum (goavddis), wooden or bone idiophones, the fadno (an angelica-stem reed flute), and, in later periods, Scandinavian fiddles and Jew’s harp. Since the late 20th century, Sámi artists have fused joik with jazz, rock, pop, ambient, and electronic production, creating a contemporary Sámi sound that travels easily between the festival stage, film/TV, and concert hall while keeping a clear line back to the ancestral voice.

Kai is a traditional style of overtone (throat) singing from the Altai–Sayan region, especially the Altai Republic in Siberia. Rooted in shamanic cosmology, kai emphasizes a very low fundamental with clearly articulated upper partials that outline pentatonic figures. Performers (kaichi) often accompany themselves on long‑neck lutes such as the topshur and frame drums, chanting epics and nature invocations that are believed to communicate with the land, animals, and ancestral spirits. While closely related to Tuvan and Mongolian throat‑singing practices, kai retains distinctive Altaian timbres, epic‑narration delivery, and a repertoire that moves fluidly between recitative storytelling and sustained, droning vocal textures.

Jaw harp music centers on the sound of plucked, vibrating reeds held against the mouth, using the oral cavity as a resonator. Known worldwide by many names (khomus, vargan, guimbarde, munnharpe, morchang, dan moi, kubing, marranzano, etc.), it produces a ringing drone with rich overtones that can be shaped into melodies by changing mouth shape, tongue position, and breath. The style spans solo ritual pieces, dance rhythms, and contemporary fusions. Timbres range from dry, woody twang on bamboo/wood instruments to bright, metallic shimmer on forged steel frames. Players emphasize rhythmic pulsation, overtone-melody articulation, and percussive articulations (glottal stops, tongue slaps, breath accents) to create hypnotic, trance-like grooves or delicate, speech-like phrases.

Tribal ambient is a branch of ambient music that merges spacious, drone-based atmospheres with hand-played, "tribal" percussion, non-Western instrumentation, and environmental field recordings. It emphasizes trance-inducing polyrhythms, ritualistic timbres (frame drums, shakers, clay and skin drums, rattles), and sustained harmonic beds, often evoking a sense of timeless, pre-industrial ritual or nature-centered spirituality. Rather than song-like structures, pieces unfold slowly and organically, favoring texture, space, and gradual transformation over melody or chord changes. The result is immersive, cinematic soundscapes that feel both primordial and otherworldly.

Ambient is a form of electronic and electroacoustic music that prioritizes tone, atmosphere, and texture over conventional song structures and rhythmic drive. It typically features slow-moving harmonies, sustained drones, gentle timbral shifts, and extensive use of space and silence. Rather than drawing attention to itself through hooks or beats, ambient is designed to be as ignorable as it is interesting, rewarding both background listening and focused immersion. Artists often employ synthesizers, samplers, tape loops, field recordings, and subtle acoustic instruments, with reverb and delay creating a sense of place. Substyles range from luminous, consonant soundscapes to darker, more dissonant atmospheres.