Egypt is often associated with a specific sound and style (at least in the west) and I'm wondering if this is in any way similar to Egyptian music from antiquity or if it's more closely related to middle eastern music? How much do we know about the music played during the Old Kingdom?
Thanks for this question! I have a degree in museum studies and am in a graduate program for ancient Mediterranean/Near Eastern archaeology. I can attempt to address where we got our idea of snake-charming, bellydancing “Egyptian music” from, as well as what little we know about music from pre-Islamic Egypt. Unfortunately, I’m not comfortable addressing music from the medieval/early modern Islamic periods, nor contemporary music in the Middle East, so I will leave that part of your question unanswered.
Very short answer: the stereotyped modern “Egyptian music” (the kind that plays on the street in Indiana Jones movies) does not relate to ancient Egyptian music.
“Egyptian music” is a broad and nebulous term. I’ll narrow the topic down a bit and assume that the “specific sound and style” that most people hear in their heads when they think of stereotypical Egyptian music is the famous Arabian song, which is a short melody that was popularized during the 1893 World Columbian Exhibition (the fair well known from The Devil in the White City by Erik Larsen). The Chicago World’s Fair and the vogue for world fairs around the turn of the century was an early iteration of what we would now recognize as a museum; several renowned modern museums were founded directly out of a need to house objects from world fairs. To draw in visitors as well as demonstrate Western* cultural superiority over the rest of the world, these World Fairs exoticized non-Western cultures (in some quite racist and problematic ways), showing the most interesting and exaggerated ways in which non-Western cultures were different from the West. The Arabian Song was composed by Sol Bloom for the Egyptian section of the 1893 World Fair, called “A Street in Cairo”, which purported to be a full street directly from the Egyptian city Cairo, magically transported to Chicago, complete with the famous exotic dancer Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, also known as “Little Egypt”.
It has been a while since I read it, but I seem to recall that Devil in the White City implies the Arabian Song was composed more or less on the spot for the exhibition—which already suggests it has little to do with contemporary Egyptian/Arabian music. However, the earliest recorded version of this melody comes from the 18th century French Colin prend sa hotte, which may derive from an earlier unrecorded Algerian folk song. It’s very likely that the Arabian song became part of the Egyptian exhibition of the World Fair through the influence of the Melodie Arabie by the German composer Franz Hünten. Hünten’s Melodie Arabie is part of a much wider cultural fascination with all things Oriental** during the mid-to-late 19th century and early 20th century. This fascination plays out in too many ways to list, but here are a three famous examples from music: the various Oriental dances in the Nutcracker ballet (1892), the opera Madame Butterfly (1904), and the orchestral piece Scheherazade (1888). Note that these musical pieces aren’t drawing on actual non-Western musical traditions, but rather playing off of popular Western ideas of how non-Western music sounds. That is, they are writing for an audience who already thinks music from the Middle East and far East should sound a certain way, and are using classical chords, melodies, and instruments to demonstrate and reinforce this sound.
The 19th century was a pretty sexually repressed, normative era. Having Oriental sections to ballets like the Nutcracker allowed choreographers and dancers to explore different, more sensual body movements than Swan Lake-style ballet—something which would be highly inappropriate except when it’s supposedly a non-white woman doing all that sensual writhing. This is where the Arabian Song is relevant again. It accompanied bellydancing at the World Fair. It allowed people (read: almost entirely men) to watch a half-naked woman sensuously entertain them in a public space without compromising white women, who were supposed to remain pure and chaste. I say all this specifically because I want to try and situate the “specific sound and style” of Egyptian music within the cultural milieu of its conception. It had less to do with actual Egypt than with exoticism and sexual thrill, and remained popular because sex doesn’t go out of style.
As for ancient Egyptian music: the short answer is we don’t know what it sounded like. People in the ancient world didn’t really write down their musical notation (one possible rare exception: the Hurrian tablets from Ugarit). You asked about Old Kingdom (c. 2700–2200 BC, over 4000 years ago). I’m not sure if you chose that timeframe arbitrarily or for a specific reason, but given the sparseness of the archaeological evidence, I’d like to expand that timeframe to all of Pharoanic Egyptian history (roughly until c. 500 BCE), as well as include some of the surrounding cultures, such as the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, which were in contact with the Egyptian kingdoms. Don't worry, this doesn't change the answer much, it just gives us more to lean on. Archaeological evidence doesn’t tell us how music was structured, but it can give us an idea of what instruments were used, and these instruments can give an idea of what the dominant sounds might have been. We get our evidence for instruments from graves and from a wealth of pictoral depictions of people playing instruments. We also know, from artistic depictions, as well as from literary and administrative documents, that musician was a profession, and could be quite high-status. Harp-like instruments, which are played by plucking the string with a finger or a pick, are very popular. They appear in art, such as this relief from the New Kingdom tomb of Patenemheb (c. 1500-1300 BCE). One of the most famous artifact sets from ancient Mesopotamia are the lyres from the Great Death Pit at Ur (c. 2500 BCE), of which I have linked one. To this ancient orchestra we can add all manner of percussion: cymbals, drums, rattles, scrapers, bells. There are also flutes/pipes, which survive nicely in the archaeological record and appear both in physical form, and in representation. There is apparently evidence of representations of reeded instruments (like clarinets) from Old Kingdom Egypt. I will update if I can track down a specific citation for this object. People in the ancient world loved playing music, and musicians were a staple of banquet scenes in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece (as well as other cultures, I’m sure, which I have not had the chance to study). I don’t want to leave out the voice as an instrument, despite the lesser archaeological evidence for it. There is plenty of Sumerian poetry, for example, that might have been recited—or sung.
I’m aware that there are theories on how the dominant musical scales of ancient cultures were constructed based on the sounds that excavated instruments are capable of producing, but that’s a topic quite out of my wheelhouse, so I’d rather not feed any misinformation. More importantly, the composers of the 19th and 20th centuries were definitely also not experts in these ancient musical instruments—so they were definitely not getting their inspiration from ancient sources.
*European, North American
**I acknowledge that the term “Orient” or “Oriental” has racist connotations, and I wouldn’t use it except that I think it actually is appropriate in this situation. The Western 18th/19th/early 20th century view of the Orient is, put very simply, “people who aren’t us”. Edward Saïd termed this the Other. The Orient doesn’t actually represent China, or Japan, or Iran/Persia, but it encompasses the sense that all these places are similarly Other to the West. It’s very much a term wrapped with connotations of fascination and fear. “These Orientals! They’re so different from us. It’s kind of sexy! But only as long as we feel culturally superior to them.”
Edits: reddit formatting, typos