Introduction
This is my attempt to make some kind of order out of the wonderful and creative chaos of musical instruments. Don't take this as the One And Only Truth. There is no such thing as a "correct" musical instruments classification system. It isn't even the final word from me on the topic. This family tree is constantly modified and expanded.Oh well, read the disclaimer if you want to know more about the background, if not, just enjoy the tree! It may be highly subjective but it should serve a purpose or two... At least it looks quite impressive, don't you think?
The instruments family tree is constantly being modified, tweaked and expanded. Tomorrow it probably looks slightly different than it does today.
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Disclaimer
There is no such thing as a correct family tree of musical instruments. It's all subjective in the end; there simply aren't any objective criteria to base a classification system on!A pure Darwinian/historical point of view won't work because instruments don't evolve in an orderly fashion. New ones are invented by mad scientists (known as "instrument makers") splicing together genes from numerous "parents" (and adding some inventions of their own) and - most of all - by performing musicians adopting any objects they have at hand to produce the sound needed.
The numerous occurences of parallel evolution don't help much either. Take the pan pipes for example. European and South American pan pipes are so similar most everybody would group them together. Yet there is no known historical connection between them.
Popular view - there is no such thing. Depending on time and cultural background everybody (that is everybody who reflect on such a topic at all) have their own view on how different instruments are related.
Most people seem to put much store in what an instrument is called. Unfortunately that's a very volatile factor and rarely very useful. It also leads to circualr definitions such as "a mandolin is an instrument that's called a mandolin."
Composers may want to classify instruments by their sound. But how do you do that? There really are no objective criteria for classifying different sounds either and besides, most instruments can produce a wide variety of different tones.
Some people feel instruments should be classified by how they are played. There's a lot to that and I believe any practical classification system have to consider this aspect.
You can't base the system on it though.
Instruments can be classified by how they are contructed. The question is: which contruction details are the significant ones? And which are the constant ones.
It seems most musicoligists today support the Sachs-Hornbostel system. The basis of that system is how an instrument creates sound - there are chordophones (instruments with strings), aerophones (wind instruments) etc. This gives rather good results on the "higher" classification levels (although a bit counter-intuitive at times) but unfortunately breaks down completely once we go deeper into the details.
The classification system used here tries to take all these factors into account and weigh them against each other. This of course leads to many subjective decisions - unfortunate but there simply isn't any alternative.
In the end: a musical instruments classification system can be useful and sometimes necessary. It's not all-important though. After all, what really matters is the music played on them.
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