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250px|thumb|Ngombi of Fang people, type 3.
Music of Gabon encompasses the traditional, ritual, popular and urban musics of the Gabonese Republic. Scholarly literature describes Gabonese musical life as highly diverse, reflecting the country's ethnolinguistic plurality, especially Fang, Myènè, Teke, Punu, Njebi, Kota, Mitsogo and Babongo/Bongo communities, and the close historical connection between music, dance, healing, initiation and oral literature.
Gabonese musical traditions are especially notable for the importance of sung narrative, harp traditions, initiation repertories and dance societies. Among the best-known forms discussed in the literature are the Fang mvet, which denotes both an instrument and a genre of oral literature, and the harp-centred ritual musics of bwiti/bwete associations.
From the late colonial period onward, Gabonese musicians also absorbed influences from church music, French-language song, Congolese rumba, soukous, zouk and, later, global hip hop. In the post-independence era, music participated in the construction of a national culture, while remaining marked by regional styles and transnational circulation. Among the most internationally visible Gabonese recording artists are Pierre Akendengué, a singer-songwriter closely associated with poetic and pan-African composition, and Oliver N'Goma, whose 1990 album Bane became a major Afro-zouk success.
Traditional and ritual music
250px|thumb|Ngombi of Fang people, type 3.
General characteristics
Traditional music in Gabon is inseparable from social context. Ethnomusicological work has emphasized that repertories are organized around ceremonies, age grades, healing, initiation, storytelling, collective celebration and dance, rather than around a single pan-Gabonese style.
The historical literature also records the importance of dance associations among the Fang. Jacques Binet's study of Fang dance societies treated dance, music, spectacle and changing social life as intertwined domains, and it remains a frequently cited source on the performative organization of Fang musical culture in the twentieth century.
The mvet
250px|thumb|Mvet with multiple gourd resonators
Among Fang-speaking populations, the mvet is one of the most discussed Gabonese musical forms in the scholarly literature. Pierre Alexandre noted that the word mvet designates both a chordophone with resonators and the oral genres performed or declaimed to its accompaniment.
Bwiti and bwete music
Ritual music occupies a central place in studies of Gabon. The best-known example is the body of repertories associated with Bwiti (often also written bwete in some ethnographic contexts), a complex of initiation and healing practices documented especially among Fang and Mitsogo-related populations.
James W. Fernandez's classic studies describe music as a constitutive rather than merely decorative element of Fang Bwiti: chants, responsorial structures, dance, sermonizing and the ritual sound of the harp all participate in the production of symbolic consensus and religious experience.
Regional diversity
250px|thumb|Gabonese [[Timbrh|sanza lamellophone]]
The idea of a single "Pygmy music" for Gabon has been challenged by later ethnomusicology. Sylvie Le Bomin and Jean-Émile Mbot argued that the various populations grouped under the label "Bongo" possess markedly different musical heritages, shaped by geography and by sustained contact with neighbouring non-Pygmy populations. Their study classifies these differences through repertories, instruments, vocal techniques and polyphonic processes rather than through a single essentialized ethnic style.
Comparable regional studies exist for other Gabonese communities. Le Bomin's work on Teke music and the joint Le Bomin–Bikoma volume on Myènè repertories document musical systems on their own terms, emphasizing the importance of local languages, instruments, dance forms and ceremonial repertories from the coast to the middle Ogooué region. His oeuvre has also drawn attention from film and literary scholars because of its engagement with anticolonial themes, African history and the political uses of musical modernity.
In Gabon, rap was not only an imported genre but also a site of linguistic and cultural experimentation. Aterianus-Owanga argues that artists framed their practice through a claim to "orality," which was expressed in at least three ways: the formation of youth slang such as toli bangando, the creative reuse of the Fang mvet, and the staging of initiation-society symbols within rap and slam performance. Their article argues that ritual music did not simply lose meaning when recorded; rather, new media became part of the social life of these repertories and of their recontextualization beyond the initiation setting.