Musical Instruments
Musical instruments are devices which are used to create music, if this taken literally then anything which can produce sound could be classified under the category of musical instruments. However, this is a rather pedantic explanation and most people are referring to a device that has been manufactured with the specific purpose to make music such as a piano, or a guitar when they use the term musical instruments.
There are a wide range of musical instruments available which typically fall into four categories. Brass musical instruments produced by the vibration of the players lips when they blow into a resonator. Woodwind musical instruments produce a tone when air is blown against an opening or edge such as a reed. String musical instruments cause sound via a vibrating string and percussive musical instruments produce sound when they are struck. Despite these four distinct categories of musical instruments there are those which cross the boundaries of these classifications such as pianos, which can be categorised as a percussive and stringed musical instruments, as keys are struck, which causes a string to vibrate.
Most musical instruments require a great deal of refined skill in order to play well and many virtuoso players have spent countless hours practising in order to refine their skills. There is also a great deal of variety in the musical instruments that appear in different cultures and societies across the world. The variety seen in musical instruments is as broad as the variety of music itself, and many different types of musical instruments exist, some producing quite remarkable sounds.