Musical Instruments

Woodwinds:

Piccolo (highest), flute, alto flute, recorder

Oboe, English horn (alto oboe)

Piccolo clarinet, B flat clarinet, bass clarinet

Saxophone (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone)

Bassoon, contrabassoon (lowest)

Brass:

Trumpet (highest)

French horn

Trombone, bass trombone

Tuba (lowest)

Strings:

Violin (highest), viola, cello, string bass (lowest)

Guitar, lute, mandolin

Harp

Percussion:

Timpani (comes in four sizes)

Snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum

Gong, triangle, chimes, wind machine

Wood blocks, siren, cymbals, temple blocks, castanets, tambourine

Glockenspiel, xylophone, marimba, vibraphone

Keyboards:

Piano, harpsichord, celesta, organ

Note: These are the instruments in common use in Western music. There are an untold number of other instruments that have existed since the beginning of time.

Early Electronic Instruments

Musical inventors have been toying with sound and electricity since the middle of the 18th century. The first electric synthesizer dates from 1876. Elisha Gray invented a Musical Telegraph and in doing so came up with the first oscillator. In 1897 Thaddeus Hill invented his Telharmonium whose technology later lead to the development of the Hammond Organ (1929). The Audion from 1906 employed the first vacuum tube that led to the generation and amplification of electrical signals, radio broadcasting, and electronic computation. An electronic instrument still popular today is the Theremin named after its inventor, Leon Theremin. It was the first instrument you played without touching it. A number of composers wrote for it and it is still being manufactured almost a hundred years after its creation in 1919. In 1928 Maurice Martenot invented a microtonal keyboard that attracted a number of leading composers at the time.

The first commercial synthesizer was the Novachord. This 500 pound monster was produced from 1938 to 1942. It used 163 vacuum tubes and produced 72-note polyphony. Edgard Varese wrote his famous Poeme Electronique for the 1958 Brussels Worlds Fair using the Clavivox synthesizer invented by Raymond Scott and Robert Moog. The Mark II Sound Synthesizer, housed at Columbia University in 1957, was a room full of interconnected equipment that was programmable using a paper tape sequencer. Making one minute of music was a slow and laborious task. In the 1960s composers used organ-like keyboards or Fortran 4-B IBM cards to program their human-size Moog Computers. The first digital synthesizers showed up in the 1980s. Since that time synthesizers have gotten smaller and smaller. Today people create music in their laptops and cell phones using amazing amounts of computational power unimaginable a half century ago.

The Mark II Sound Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Lab