History of music

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History of music and different types of musical instruments

Imagining life without music is like imagining a life without love, emotion and feelings. Music is said to be the soul of life. It is said that music is nature's gift to mankind and it has got great power to soothe human mind and body. Music is peace, music is worship and it's a part of humanity. Music is what we do all the time. Humming of birds is music, an infant's cry is music, loved ones' voice is music, and even the sound produced from a keystroke on a computer is music too. From ancient history, man has been making music through various different means that are all collectively termed musical instruments. Theoretically defined, musical instruments are objects used or made to create music, or musical sounds. So speaking by definition, anything that can produce some sound would qualify for one or the other types of music instruments. The history of music is not yet known to mankind, and so it's not possible to precisely tell the exact history of all these different types of music instruments. However, as per what's been found till date, in their history, musical instruments go back to the very beginning of human civilization.

Music is a blend of art and science. To learn, practice and play music one needs to be completely devoted and determined to the task. Instruments are said to be the tools of a musician, and as with any other art form, the more practiced and skilled musicians become in playing different types of music instruments, the more capable they become of producing great music with their tools. Music has evolved with mankind and as there were newer and newer types of music developed, newer types of music instruments were developed to play that kind of music too.

There are different thoughts about the categorization of different types of music instruments. There are some who believe that musical instruments are primarily divided into four different categories of string family, brass family, woodwind family, and percussion family. Then there are those who believe that as the instruments from both, woodwind family and brass family are blown to make music, they should fall under one single category of wind family. So people from this school of thought only divide musical instruments into three categories of musical string instruments, musical wind instruments, and musical percussion instruments.

According to another less common categorization, musical instruments are divided into aerophones, chordophones, idiophones, and membranophones. Aerophones produce music by expelling air out through a cylindrical vessel. Chordophones produce sounds by the vibration of their strings that are stretched very tightly. Idiophones are made up of materials to produce naturally pleasant sounds. Membranophones have many tightly stretched membranes and music is produced when such membranes are hit and they make sound.

With the evolution and modernization of music and all the global music instruments coming in, some have started added keyboard to a category of musical instruments. The argument is that musical instruments are categorized in different families that work differently to product music and these days most global music instruments have keyboard as a key feature.

Let's dig in a little deeper in the primary three categories of musical instruments starting with string instruments. Musical instruments that produce music when their strings are vibrated are string instruments. In string instruments, when the sound is produced, it is amplified using either or both of the two methods. In first method, the body is punctured with little holes from where the music is amplified by a microphone plugged to an amplifier. In the second method piezoelectric touches are used to generate electrical signals directly out of vibration of string. Such signals are then amplified to a loudspeaker. Perhaps the best known example of a string instrument is a violin.

Next category of music instruments is wind instrument. These are instruments where music is produced by column of air that's set to vibrate by the air that's blown by the player. For a pipe organ, however, mechanical means are employed to vibrate the air column. As noted earlier, wind instruments are primarily divided into two main subgroups, the brass and the woodwind. One primary difference, as their names suggest, between brass and woodwind categories is that traditionally brass wind instruments were brass made whereas woodwind instruments were wood made. However, this is not held as a valid categorization point by many as just the material that is used to make the instrument is never a steady way of judging its family type. Instead, a rather authentic way of determining if an instrument is woodwind or brass is going by how the player is producing the sound. In most brass instruments, player's lips flutter the air in the instrument to produce music.

The third category of percussion instruments is a rather simple one. By definition, percussion instruments are objects that produce sound/music when set into vibration on being hit. So despite all the global music instruments that have now been invented, all the music instruments fall in these three major categories.