How Many Musical Instruments Are There in the World?

There is no single agreed total of musical instruments around the world, as the answer depends on how instruments and their regional variants are counted. The traditional western approach classes them as string, woodwind, brass, keyboard, and percussion instruments.

A more comprehensive approach called Hornbostel-Sachs classifies them by the way the instruments produce their sound providing a more accurate categorization.

Archaeology has shown that musical instruments existed in the Stone Age, with surviving bone and ivory flutes among the evidence. This does not establish when people first began making music. Ancient cultures in the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, India, the Americas, and East Asia all had musical instruments, and the surviving objects show only part of that variety. Many instruments were made from materials that do not preserve well, so an archaeological catalogue cannot provide a complete worldwide count.

There are many ways to classify and examine musical instruments, with a familiar western approach using the strings, woodwind, brass, percussion, and keyboard families. These groups are useful for discussing an orchestra or an ensemble, but they mix different criteria, including the source of the sound and the way an instrument is played.

However, new instruments from different cultures came into play later, which did not fit neatly into this system. So, other categories were added, and the system became more focused on the technique needed to play the instruments.

This system is also called the western system as it was created with western instruments in mind.

Strings

The first instrument family is called strings. As the name suggests, it covers the instruments that produce sounds with the vibration of one or more strings. Regional designs, names, and playing techniques make this a much broader family than one short list can cover.

String instruments are examined in three branches which divide the instruments with the way they are played.

Bowed Strings

Bowed Strings include the violin, viola, cello, and double bass, along with the old viol family. These instruments are all played with the method of bowing the strings. There are many other bowed string instruments from different cultures, such as ravanahatha from India, rebab from Islamic Empires, kamanche from Persia, and lira from Byzantine.

Plucked Strings

The plucked strings consist of instruments that are played by plucking the strings for vibration. Instruments such as guitar, banjo, ukulele, harp, mandolin, sitar, veena, oud, and saz fall in this category and are played by thumb, fingers, or plectrum (picks.)

Hammered Strings

Another lesser-known string instrument family is the hammered strings. These instruments are played by striking the strings with a small spoon-shaped mallet hammer. The hammered dulcimer instruments of different cultures belong to this family. The most famous examples are santur from Persia, yangqin from China, salterio from Italy, and Spain.

Hammered strings and the piano share the principle of striking strings to produce sound. In a piano, however, pressing a key operates a hammer mechanism rather than the player striking the strings directly. That is why the piano fits both a keyboard grouping and a sound-based string classification.

Woodwind

Woodwind instruments are the first sub-family of the wind instrument family, which are played by breath. These instruments use vibrating air column mechanisms to produce sound. Although the name suggests wood, the instruments can be made from any material, including wood, brass, silver, cane, or even gold.

This family includes flutes, saxophones, clarinets, oboes, bassoons, and English horns as the major instruments. The woodwinds are divided into two sub-categories as they use different methods to start vibrations.

Woodwinds With Reeds

The first sub-category is woodwinds with reeds such as clarinets, saxophones, bassoons, and oboes. These instruments produce their unique sounds when air is blown inside them through the mouthpiece, which vibrates the reed and the air column inside the instrument.

Edge-blown Woodwinds

The other woodwind sub-category is the edge-blown woodwinds or, simply, flutes. The vibrations start by blowing air against an edge of a hole in a tube. These instruments include recorders, bamboo flutes and ocarinas.

Brass

The second category of wind instruments is brass instruments. Brasswind instruments differ from woodwind instruments in the way they are played. Players vibrate their lips and buzz them against a mouthpiece instead of directly blowing into a reed or edge of a hole. 

The vibrating lips start the sound, while the instrument’s air column helps determine the notes available. Players adjust pitch with their lips and air, and on many instruments with valves; a slide trombone changes the tube length with its slide. Brass instruments include variations of the trumpet, tuba, French horn, baritone, and trombone. Although the name is brass, lip-vibrated instruments such as the serpent, didgeridoo, and alphorn can be made from other materials.

Percussion 

Percussion instruments can provide the heartbeat of music played as a group. They can establish rhythm, mark accents, or add colour, and some also play melodies. This is a varied family, from small hand-held shakers to large drums and sets of tuned bars.

There are many different percussion instruments in terms of the way they are played, and the way sound is created. That is why they are divided by the type of sound they create.

Unpitched Percussion

Unpitched percussion instruments produce sounds without a clearly defined note for the player to select. They can shape rhythm, accents, and texture rather than usually carrying a tuned melody. Popular examples include snare drums, bass drums, cymbals, tambourines, frame drums, and triangles. Not all of these instruments are drums: cymbals and triangles have vibrating solid bodies rather than drumheads.

Pitched Percussion

Pitched percussion instruments can create certain pitches and notes. Instruments such as xylophone, timpani, and handpan belong to this sub-category as they are percussive instruments that can create specific notes and melodies.

Keyboard

The last musical instrument family is the keyboard family. The keyboard instruments may have different methods for producing sounds, but they all feature a keyboard between the instrument and the player as the interface. The piano, organ, hurdy-gurdy, and harpsichord are the most famous members of the family.

Electronic Instruments

Electronic is not a traditional musical instrument family. However, with the advanced technology, there are new instruments that do not fall in any of the previous categories. That is why a new family line was needed for the classification.

This family includes instruments whose sounds are produced or shaped electrically, from electronic organs to theremins and synthesizers. An organ with electric action can still produce sound through vibrating air in pipes. Likewise, an acoustic instrument fitted with a pickup has not automatically become a different sound-producing family just because it is amplified.

Hornbostel-Sachs Instrument Classification System

Another way to categorize musical instruments is the Hornbostel-Sachs Instrument Classification System, originally created by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs in 1914. Museums use versions of this system to describe instruments from many cultures according to how their sound is produced.

The original system had four main classes. Later revisions add electrophones as a fifth group, including the version used by the Musical Instrument Museums Online project.

Idiophones

The first class is the idiophones which create sound with the vibration of the body of the instrument. The famous members here are maracas, handpan, clapping, cymbals, bells, thumb piano, jaw harp, etc.

Membranophones

Membranophones are instruments that feature a vibrating membrane to create sound. Most drums and kazoos are members of this class. 

Chordophones

Chordophones feature a vibrating string or strings to produce their sound. Violin, cello, guitar, harp are members of this class, as well as piano and some keyboards.

Aerophones

Aerophones use vibrating columns of air to create their sound. The wind instruments that require air to play fall in this class, such as flutes, trumpets, saxophones, bagpipes, and clarinets.

Electrophones

Finally, electrophones include instruments that generate electrical signals for sound, such as synthesizers and theremins. The MIMO revision also includes electro-acoustic instruments such as purpose-built electric guitars. An otherwise unmodified acoustic guitar with an added pickup can remain a chordophone, so electrical amplification alone does not settle the classification.

Summary

Music has always been a universal component of human culture. For thousands of years, we as humans have used and are still using different tools to produce sounds that express our thoughts and feelings. That is why we have created a wide range of different musical instruments to produce different sounds.

There is no definite worldwide total because instruments are so diverse across cultures, and names, regional variants, and new designs complicate the count. The families above are a way to understand that variety, rather than evidence for a fixed number of instruments or an equal number in every family.