The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute produces sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In the Hornbostel–Sachs classification system, flutes are edge-blown aerophones. A musician who plays the flute is called a flautist or flutist.
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and chordophone.
Hornbostel–Sachs or Sachs–Hornbostel is a system of musical instrument classification devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, and first published in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in 1914. An English translation was published in the Galpin Society Journal in 1961. It is the most widely used system for classifying musical instruments by ethnomusicologists and organologists. The system was updated in 2011 as part of the work of the Musical Instrument Museums Online (MIMO) Project.
Relative pitch is the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note by comparing it to a reference note and identifying the interval between those two notes. For example, if the notes Do and Fa are played on a piano, a person with relative pitch would be able to identify the second note from the first note given that they know that the first note is Do without looking.
The ney, is an end-blown flute that figures prominently in Persian music, Turkish music, Jewish music and Arabic music. In some of these musical traditions, it is the only wind instrument used. The ney has been played continually for 4,500–5,000 years, dating back to ancient Egypt, making it one of the oldest musical instruments still in use.
The Scottish smallpipe is a bellows-blown bagpipe re-developed by Colin Ross and many others, adapted from an earlier design of the instrument. There are surviving bellows-blown examples of similar historical instruments as well as the mouth-blown Montgomery smallpipes, dated 1757, which are held in the National Museum of Scotland. Some instruments are being built as direct copies of historical examples, but few modern instruments are directly modelled on older examples; the modern instrument is typically larger and lower-pitched. The innovations leading to the modern instrument, in particular the design of the reeds, were largely taken from the Northumbrian smallpipes.
The kaval is a chromatic end-blown oblique flute traditionally played throughout the Balkans and Anatolia. The kaval is primarily associated with mountain shepherds.
The tenor saxophone is a medium-sized member of the saxophone family, a group of instruments invented by Adolphe Sax in the 1840s. The tenor and the alto are the two most commonly used saxophones. The tenor is pitched in the key of B♭ (while the alto is pitched in the key of E♭), and written as a transposing instrument in the treble clef, sounding an octave and a major second lower than the written pitch. Modern tenor saxophones which have a high F♯ key have a range from A♭2 to E5 (concert) and are therefore pitched one octave below the soprano saxophone. People who play the tenor saxophone are known as "tenor saxophonists", "tenor sax players", or "saxophonists".
The jug used as a musical instrument is an empty jug played with buzzed lips to produce a trombone-like tone. The characteristic sound of the jug is low and hoarse, below the higher pitch of the fiddle, harmonica, and the other instruments in the band.
The Claviola is a musical instrument that was designed in the 1960s by Hohner technician and designer Ernst Zacharias. The instrument was produced for a few months in the late 1990s before being discontinued.
A single-reed instrument is a woodwind instrument that uses only one reed to produce sound. The very earliest single-reed instruments were documented in ancient Egypt, as well as the Middle East, Greece, and the Roman Empire. The earliest types of single-reed instruments used idioglottal reeds, where the vibrating reed is a tongue cut and shaped on the tube of cane. Much later, single-reed instruments started using heteroglottal reeds, where a reed is cut and separated from the tube of cane and attached to a mouthpiece of some sort. By contrast, in a double reed instrument, there is no mouthpiece; the two parts of the reed vibrate against one another. Reeds are traditionally made of cane and produce sound when air is blown across or through them. The type of instruments that use a single reed are clarinets and saxophone. The timbre of a single and double reed instrument is related to the harmonic series caused by the shape of the corpus. E.g. the clarinet is only including the odd harmonics due to air column modes canceling out the even harmonics. This may be compared to the timbre of a square wave.
The koudi is a very small Chinese flute made from bamboo. It is the smallest flute in the Chinese flute family. Its original shape derives from prehistorical instruments made with animal bone, but the modern koudi is made with wood, bamboo or PVC. It was invented in 1971 by dizi master Yu Xunfa.
The mangtong is a Chinese end-blown free reed wind instrument. It is used primarily by the Miao and Dong ethnic groups of the southern Chinese provinces of Guizhou and Guangxi, although it is sometimes used in contemporary Chinese compositions for the traditional instrument orchestra.
The Nohkan is a high pitched, Japanese transverse bamboo flute, or fue. It is commonly used in traditional Imperial Noh and Kabuki theatre. The nohkan flute was created by Kan'ami and his son Zeami in the 15th century, during the time when the two were transforming the Noh theatre forms Dengaku and Sarugaku.
The dangjeok (Korean: 당적) is a small end blown bamboo flute used in traditional Korean music. Slightly smaller than its close instrument relative, the junggeum, the dangjoek is of Chinese origin. Its name, derived from the Chinese Tang dynasty, dangjeok translates to "Tang end blown bamboo flute." The dangjeok is an aerophone which gives off a clear and bright sound, and has a limited one and a half octave range according to the ancient Korean music treatise, the akhakgwebeom. It is often played accompanied by the Korean lute and xylophone. Remodeled to enhance range, it is made of yellow bamboo or sick bamboo, and possesses a single end-blowing notch, and seven holes to control pitch, though the seventh hole is not used. Of traditional and current instruments of Korean origin, the dangjeok has the highest pitch.
The Turkish ney is an end-blown flute made of reed, an Ottoman variation on the ancient ney. Together with the Turkish tanbur lute and Turkish kemençe fiddle are considered the most typical instruments of Classical Turkish music. The ney also plays a primary role in the music of the Mevlevi Sufi rites (semâ).
Fue (笛/ふえ) is the Japanese word for bamboo flute, and refers to a class of flutes native to Japan. Fue come in many varieties, but are generally high-pitched and made of a bamboo called shinobue. The most popular of the fue is the shakuhachi.
A vessel flute is a type of flute with a body which acts as a Helmholtz resonator. The body is a vessel-shaped, not a tube- or cone-shaped; that is, the far end is closed.
The sneng or snaeng is an aerophone made from an ox horn or water buffalo horn. It is loud enough to call across a distance and has been used in rural environments to signal mealtimes, give warning, call for help or indicate a need to return to the village. It was also used to call domestic elephants in from the field, and hunters communicated with it.
