Identify the Musical Instrument Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This small instrument has a round or teardrop-shaped body and eight strings arranged in four pairs, each pair tuned to the same note. It is played with a pick, often with a fast trembling stroke to make a note sing. It is common in Italian folk music and American bluegrass.

Question 2

This is a small wooden board or hollow box fitted with a row of thin metal tongues of different lengths, fixed at one end and free at the other. The player holds it in both hands and plucks the free ends with the thumbnails. It is also known as a thumb piano.

Question 3

This Chinese instrument is a two-string fiddle with a long neck and a small sound box, often faced with snakeskin, that rests on the player's thigh. The bow hair runs permanently between the two strings, so it can never be taken off, and there is no fingerboard to press the strings against. Its tone is high and voice-like.

Question 4

This West African hand drum is shaped like a large goblet or egg cup, carved from a single block of hardwood, with a goatskin head pulled tight by a web of rope. Struck with bare hands, it gives a deep boom from the centre and sharp, ringing tones from the rim.

Question 5

This Russian folk instrument has an unmistakable flat, triangular wooden body, a short fretted neck, and just three strings, two of them usually tuned to the same note. It is played by strumming and by rapid flicking of one finger, and it comes in a whole family of sizes from tiny to as large as a double bass.

Question 6

This long-necked lute has metal strings in three or four pairs and a bright, ringing, metallic tone. It is the lead instrument of rebetiko, the gritty urban folk music of early 20th-century Greece, and of much modern Greek pop; a flat-backed version was later adopted into Irish traditional music.

Question 7

This small rectangular instrument is held in both hands and moved back and forth against the lips. Breathing in and out through its row of holes sounds hidden metal reeds, each giving a different note. Cheap and pocket-sized, it is a staple of blues, folk and country music.

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About Identify the Musical Instrument

Can you name the instrument? Each question shows a photograph of a musical instrument and gives three short, easy sentences about it: how it is played, what family it belongs to, and where it comes from, without ever saying its name. You then pick it from four choices, and the answer fills in the rest.

The instruments come from all over the world. Some are the standard voices of a Western orchestra, like the violin, the cello, the flute and the trumpet. Some are the backbone of pop and jazz, like the drum kit, the saxophone and the acoustic guitar. And many are the signature sound of one place: the sitar and tabla of northern India, the djembe of West Africa, the bagpipes of Scotland, the erhu of China, the didgeridoo of Aboriginal Australia, the balalaika of Russia, the accordion of European and Latin American dance halls.

Part of the fun is learning to place an instrument by how it works. Is it bowed, plucked or struck? Does it have a reed, a mouthpiece for buzzing lips, or a hole to blow across? Does it make one note at a time or many at once? Is it tuned with pegs, pedals, valves or paste? These few questions will usually narrow a mystery instrument down to a small handful.

A lot of these instruments have travelled and changed. The banjo and the marimba both grew from instruments carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans. The guitar, the piano and the accordion were each pinned down to their modern form by a single maker or workshop in the 1700s or 1800s. Several folk instruments were later rebuilt into standardised concert families so that whole orchestras could be formed from them.

The clues never name the instrument or use a word that would instantly give it away, so getting the answer means recognising the shape and the description rather than reading a label. Every photograph is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, chosen from public-domain or Creative Commons sources so there is no copyright question, and every fact has been checked. The language is kept simple, so the quiz plays the same for a trained musician and for someone who has never picked up an instrument.