Musical instruments are instruments designed to produce rhythmically organized and fixed pitch sounds or clearly regulated rhythms and noises. Objects producing disorganized sounds and noises (night watchmen’s bells, hunters’ rattles, air bells, whistles) or cackles imitating birdsong and animal calls, used for hunting, as well as instruments serving special signal purposes, under certain conditions can also be used as M i.
There are also M. i. of applied purpose, used for ritual purposes (shaman tambourine, Buddhist ghan-dan and bure, Nivkh chimgre); sometimes they are used to accompany folk dances (Est. kraatspill, Latvians, trideksnis, chagana, eglite). These can include devices, with the help of which in the symph. (This can include devices with the help of which a symphony orchestra reproduces the roar of thunder, the howling of the wind, the snapping of the whip, and so on. Some of the instruments of applied and signal use can also perform artistic functions, e.g. church bells with a freely suspended tongue. Among the M. i. are also Lithuanian toshala or Latvian berzstaase, made from birch bark plates, Mari eti from lilac leaf, Ukr. luska from horn splinter, etc.; with these instruments folk musicians skillfully whistle quite complex melodies, abundantly equipping them with different passages and melismas.
Each M. i. has its own tone, specific dynamic possibilities and a certain range of sounds. The sound quality of a damper depends on the materials used for the manufacture of the instrument, the shape it is given (i.e., all the dimensional data of parts and assemblies), and can be changed by additional devices (e. g., surcharges), various methods of sound extraction (e. g., pizzicato, flageolet, etc.).
M. i. is conventionally divided into folk and professional. The first ones are made among the people and are used in everyday life and in music and art performance. The same instruments can belong both to one and different peoples, which are connected with each other by ethnic kinship, or have long historical and cultural contacts.
Professional instruments are in the vast majority created as a result of improvement and modification of folk instruments. So, for example, in the past violin was only a folk instrument, from a simple folk instrument arose the modern flute, from the primitive shalumo – clarinet etc. Professional instruments are usually referred to as M. i., which are part of symph. (opera), wind. and string orchestras, as well as wind and string keyboards (organ, flute, in the past – harpsichord, clavichord). In a number of countries (India, Iran, Turkey, China etc.) are played almost exclusively on folk M. I., and the performing art on these instruments is a sample of high professionalism in these countries. Nevertheless, in the conditions of European musical culture orchestral and especially keyboard M. i., genetically not directly related to the folk instruments, are fairly classified as the professional M. i.; their design, technical-performance and artistic-expressive possibilities are brought to perfection.
The invention of M. i. dates back to ancient times. Archaeologists have found some of them, such as horns and primitive bone flutes, in the excavations of Paleolithic human settlements. In Neolithic monuments one can find one-sided drums, wind reeds (like shalmei or shalumo), primitive xylophones and flutes with playing holes. Strings appeared later than others. M. i. – But even they were known to some people long before Christ. It is supposed that originally they were signal implements and that they were more or less connected with labor processes of primitive man. However, as archaeological materials testify, already at the early stage of human society development there were instruments which fulfilled a purely musical and aesthetic function: flutes with playing holes that allowed extracting sounds of different heights of precisely fixed sound scale (which points to the birth of a meaningful musical system), string instruments suitable only for music performance, different types of castanets accompanying single and group dances, etc. With the help of blowing, signal pipes and horns could be used for music performance.