Musical instrument

A musical instrument is a device constructed or modified for the purpose of making music. In principle, anything that produces sound can serve as a musical instrument. The term "musical instrument", however, is generally reserved for items that have a specific musical purpose. The academic study of musical instruments is called organology.

History

Archaelogical evidence for musical instruments was discovered in excavations at the Royal Cemetery in the Sumerian city of Ur. These instruments include nine lyres, two harps, a silver double flute, sistra and cymbals. These excavations, carried out by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, uncovered non-degradable fragments of instruments and the voids left by the degraded segments which, together, have been used to reconstruct them. The graves to which these instruments were related have been carbon dated to between 2600 and 2500 BCE, providing evidence that these instruments were being used in Sumeria by this time.

A cuneiform tablet from Nippur in Mesopotamia dated to 2000 BCE indicates the names of strings on the lyre and represents the the earliest known example of music notation.

Classification

Main article: Musical instrument classification

There are different methods of classifying musical instruments. One method is to examine the general physical properties of the instrument and how it interacts with its environment; this may be called a physics-based classification scheme. Another method is to examine the instrument's operation or place in an ensemble.

Performance

One of the oldest and most widely taught classification systems for musical instruments is the Strings, Percussion, and Wind classification scheme which organizes instruments based on how players produce sound with the instrument.

Range

Western instruments are also often classified by their musical range in comparison with other instruments in the same family. These terms are named after singing voice classifications:

• Soprano instruments: flute, clarinet, recorder, violin, trumpet
• Alto instruments: oboe, alto flute, viola, horn
• Tenor instruments: English horn, trombone
• Bass instruments: bassoon, double bass, bass clarinet, tuba

Some instruments fall into more than one category: for example, the cello may be considered either tenor or bass, depending on how its music fits into the ensemble, and the trombone may be alto, tenor, or bass and the French horn, bass, baritone, tenor, or alto, depending on which range it is played.

Many instruments have their range as part of their name: soprano saxophone, alto saxophone, tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, baritone horn, alto flute, bass flute, alto recorder, bass guitar, etc. Additional adjectives describe instruments above the soprano range or below the bass, for example: sopranino saxophone, contrabass clarinet.

When used in the name of an instrument, these terms are relative, describing the instrument's range in comparison to other instruments of its family and not in comparison to the human voice range or instruments of other families. For example, a bass flute's range is from C₃ to F♯₆, while a bass clarinet plays about one octave lower.

Physics

The recent invention of a number of instruments that make sound from vibrating water has prompted the introduction of a physics-based organology in which the top-level category is the state of matter of that which initially produces the sound in the instrument.

This system includes the possibility of instruments that make sound in all three states-of-matter (solid, liquid, and gas), with a fourth category for instruments that make sound from extreme-energy states such as plasma.

User interfaces

Regardless of how the sound in an instrument is produced, many musical instruments have a keyboard as the user-interface. Keyboard instruments are any instruments that are played with a musical keyboard. Every key generates one or more sounds; most keyboard instruments have extra means (pedals for a piano, stops for an organ) to manipulate these sounds. They may produce sound by wind being fanned (organ) or pumped (accordion), vibrating strings either hammered (piano) or plucked (harpsichord), by electronic means (synthesizer) or in some other way. Sometimes, instruments that do not usually have a keyboard, such as the Glockenspiel, are fitted with one. Though they have no moving parts and are struck by mallets held in the player's hands, they possess the same physical arrangement of keys and produce soundwaves in a similar manner.

See also

• Custom-made instrument
• Extended technique
• Folk instrument - a description and a list
• International Computer Music Conference (ICMC)
• List of musical instruments
• Music lessons
• New interfaces for musical expression (NIME)
• Orchestra
• Shorthand for orchestra instrumentation