Musical Instruments Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which Belgian instrument maker, working in Paris, patented in 1846 a new family of single-reed brass instruments with a conical bore, one of which became indispensable to jazz and carries his name?

Question 2

What is the name for the device, a coil of fine wire wound around one or more magnets, mounted under the strings of an electric guitar, that turns the strings' vibration into a small electric current for an amplifier?

Question 3

What is the name for the pure, glassy, flute-like high notes produced on a string by touching it very lightly at a simple fraction of its length, a half or a third or a quarter, so that it vibrates only in those segments?

Question 4

Which bowed string instrument is played sitting down, held between the knees and resting on a floor spike, and sounds a full octave below the viola, in a range often compared to the adult human voice?

Question 5

Which brass instrument changes pitch not with valves but by pushing a U-shaped section of tubing in and out through seven positions, making it the only orchestral brass that can slide smoothly from one note to another?

Question 6

What is the name for the self-playing piano, popular in homes from about 1900 to the 1920s, that worked the keys and pedals by air pressure according to the pattern of holes punched in a moving roll of paper?

Question 7

Which wind instrument keeps a bag of air topped up by the player, and feeds that air continuously to a reeded melody pipe and to one or more pipes that each sound a single unchanging note for as long as the instrument plays?

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About Musical Instruments

This quiz is about how musical instruments work: the families they fall into, the mechanism or quirk that defines each one, the parts they are built from, the playing techniques and the physics of sound behind them. It is the knowledge companion to the separate picture quiz that only asks you to recognise instruments by sight. Each of the eighty questions describes an instrument, a family, a part, a technique, an acoustic idea or a maker, and asks you to name it from four choices, then explains it.

The first pack is the essentials: the four orchestral families and how each makes its sound; the violin, piano, pipe organ, guitar, flute, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, timpani, saxophone, harp and double bass; the reed, the bow and the octave; and the layout of the orchestra itself.

The second pack goes wider. The rest of the orchestra, viola, cello, oboe, bassoon, French horn, tuba, snare drum, vibraphone, harpsichord and recorder. The parts, the bridge, the soundboard, the fret, the valve, the mouthpiece, the sound post and the three piano pedals. The techniques and acoustics, pizzicato, vibrato, harmonics, the mute, transposing instruments, the harmonic series, timbre, resonance, equal temperament and concert pitch. And a tour of the world: the sitar and tabla, bagpipes, the didgeridoo, the djembe, the steelpan, the accordion, the erhu and the kora.

The third pack is history, invention and oddity: the Hornbostel-Sachs classification; Adolphe Sax and the Stradivarius; the theremin, the Moog and the Mellotron; circular breathing and the wolf tone; the Boehm key system; Franklin's glass harmonica; the Hardanger fiddle and the hurdy-gurdy; the Cristofori piano action and the prepared piano; the bullroarer; the magnetic pickup and the player piano; the giant octobass; the ondes Martenot; and the wrap-around sousaphone.

The wrong answers are always the same kind of thing as the right one, a family beside families, a part beside parts, a technique beside techniques, so a shaky guess is easily caught. Nothing here assumes the reader can play or read music; every term is explained where it appears.

Images are used carefully and only where they cannot give the answer away. Because a photograph of an instrument would simply be the answer on most questions, a plain instrument or score photo appears only on a question about a part, a technique or an acoustic idea, and is chosen so that the pictured instrument is equally consistent with all four options. Facts have been checked, including the repeated blind-test finding that expert players cannot actually tell a Stradivarius from a fine modern violin, and the fact that the 'woodwind' family now contains metal flutes and brass saxophones.