What new musical instrument was invented in the 20th century?
There’s more than one, I’m sure, with the proliferation of musical instruments I’m seeing nowadays, but the synthesizer seems to be the most logical answer. While Gray invented something similar in the last 19th century, it was not electronic, produced a single tone, and used a vibrating metal reed as its oscillator. The first truly electronic synthesizer which could play conventional music was probably the RCA Mark II which was completed in 1958. It was still not truly playable, though, as it had to be programmed with the selected piece of music ahead of time via a laborious process of patching and preparation. Another 20th century innovation is the Chapman Stick, a stringed instrument designed to be played percussively with both hands. The instrument resembles a very wide guitar neck with no body. It was invented by Emmett Chapman in 1972. If you want to go to a finer level of granularity, into types of instruments, the electric piano appeared in the late sixties, and the electric gu
