What are the 4 families of musical instruments?
[Sorry this is so long — the topic is interesting.] Arguably there are only three, classified by how one makes the noise: scraping, blowing, hitting. We get four by subdividing blowing, the wind instruments, into woodwinds and brasses, on aesthetic and historical grounds rather than physics. Scraping and blowing both yield not just pitched notes but continuous tones — the tone can be sustained and can grow louder or softer. Hitting gives only non-continuous tones, which may or may not be pitched, but which all begin to decay, quickly or slowly but inevitably, as soon as they occur. Scraping gives the strings: violins, violas, cellos, basses, and some older members of the family lately being rediscovered, viola da gamba, cello d’amore. The continuous tone stems from an ongoing, very complex stick-slip relationship between the string itself and the rosined bow strings drawn back and forth at various speeds and pressures across it. And then the string can be plucked, making it for a few
They are – Woodwinds, Percussion, Strings, and Brass. These families are based on the physics of how the music is produced … Woodwinds produce music because of vibration of a reed or wind passing through a narrow passage (flute, bassoon etc), Percussion is due to vibration of a membrane (drums), Strings produce music through vibration by striking or plucking a string, Brass produces music through resonating harmonic chambers. Keyboards are a class of instruments that really fit into one of these classes depending on what the keys do. Piano is really a string instrument, organ is woodwinds etc. And finally, I have excluded all electronic/modern instruments.
