Concept
Musical instrument
Related concepts (79)
Flute
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. Paleolithic flutes with hand-bored holes are the earliest known identifiable musical instruments.
Pedal keyboard
A pedalboard (also called a pedal keyboard, pedal clavier, or, with electronic instruments, a bass pedalboard) is a keyboard played with the feet that is usually used to produce the low-pitched bass line of a piece of music. A pedalboard has long, narrow lever-style keys laid out in the same semitone scalar pattern as a manual keyboard, with longer keys for C, D, E, F, G, A and B, and shorter, raised keys for C, D, F, G and A. Training in pedal technique is part of standard organ pedagogy in church music and art music.
Glissando
In music, a glissando (ɡlisˈsando; plural: glissandi, abbreviated gliss.) is a glide from one pitch to another (). It is an Italianized musical term derived from the French glisser, "to glide". In some contexts, it is equivalent to portamento, which is a continuous, seamless glide between notes. In other contexts, it refers to discrete, stepped glides across notes, such as on a piano.
Hammered dulcimer
The hammered dulcimer (also called the hammer dulcimer) is a percussion-stringed instrument which consists of strings typically stretched over a trapezoidal resonant sound board. The hammered dulcimer is set before the musician, who in more traditional styles may sit cross-legged on the floor, or in a more modern style may stand or sit at a wooden support with legs. The player holds a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer in each hand to strike the strings.
Aerophone
An aerophone (ˈɛəroʊfoʊn) is a musical instrument that produces sound primarily by causing a body of air to vibrate, without the use of strings or membranes (which are respectively chordophones and membranophones), and without the vibration of the instrument itself adding considerably to the sound (or idiophones). According to Sachs, Aerophones or 'air instruments' include what are usually called 'wind instruments,' with the addition of a few instruments with a different acoustical principle called 'free aerophones.
Harry Partch
Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).
Range (music)
In music, the range, or chromatic range, of a musical instrument is the distance from the lowest to the highest pitch it can play. For a singing voice, the equivalent is vocal range. The range of a musical part is the distance between its lowest and highest note. Among British English speakers, and perhaps others, compass means the same thing as chromatic range—the interval between the lowest and highest note attainable by a voice or musical instrument.
Part (music)
A part in music refers to a component of a musical composition. Because there are multiple ways to separate these components, there are several contradictory senses in which the word "part" is used: the musical instructions for any individual instrument or voice (often given as a handwritten, printed, or digitized document) of sheet music (as opposed to the full score which shows all parts of the ensemble in the same document). A musician's part usually does not contain instructions for the other players in the ensemble, only instructions for that individual.
Tessitura
In music, tessitura (tessiˈtuːra, pl. tessiture, "texture"; tɛsᵻˈtjuːrə) is the most acceptable and comfortable vocal range for a given singer or less frequently, musical instrument, the range in which a given type of voice presents its best-sounding (or characteristic) timbre. This broad definition is often interpreted to refer specifically to the pitch range that most frequently occurs within a given part of a musical piece.
3rd bridge
The 3rd bridge is an extended playing technique used on the electric guitar and other string instruments that allows a musician to produce distinctive timbres and overtones that are unavailable on a conventional string instrument with two bridges (a nut and a saddle). The timbre created with this technique is close to that of gamelan instruments like the bonang and similar Indonesian types of pitched gongs. A third bridge can be devised by inserting a rigid preparation object between the strings and the body or neck of the instrument, effectively dividing the string into distinct vibrating segments.