Instruments

The instrument screens in this musicology section of Musical Discovery permit browsing (in alphabetical order by instrument name) through the database of instruments, with a brief description of each instrument, and a handy table of themes, extracts or full pieces played by this instrument. Classifications include Flute, Clarinet, Trombone, and so on.

At right of the screen the highest and lowest notes for each instrument are shown, expressed as MIDI note numbers. Also the best octave is shown, where 4 represents the octave starting at middle C. This is used so the sample sound for the instrument, when played by the MIDI sound card, is played at the appropriate pitch for the instrument, as MIDI sounds are not restricted to the pitch ranges of the real instruments. Also, the MIDI instrument number is shown. This is a number from 0 to 127 which is defined in the General MIDI standard, to represent the 128 tones or timbres available in the standard MIDI set.

If you click the button entitled Sample tune for this instrument  a short tune is played using the MIDI sound card set to the appropriate MIDI instrument, at the best octave.  For the main orchestral instruments, the lower section of the screen lists tunes available in the Musical Discovery database featuring this instrument.

The Instrument family shown at the right is used to categorize instruments into groups, such as the strings, the woodwinds, brass,  or world instruments.  This information is used in the screen entitled Which Instrument is this?   which can be found at MENU  Practise -> Instrument Recognition.  You can test your ability to recognize the different instrument sounds with this screen, though the sound quality will depend a great deal on the quality of the MIDI sound card or external sound module in use.

You can listen to any listed piece of music by clicking on the appropriate row in the lower section of the screen.  This then plays the music, and you can stop or pause it using the buttons on the PlayBar at the foot of the screen. Also you can use the slider to move forward or back to any desired part of the music. As an alternative to clicking the buttons with the mouse, the space bar can be used to start or pause the music, or use F2 to play and F3 to stop.

To move to a different instrument, you can either click on the Next Instrument or Previous Instrument button, or else use the shortcut keys Page Down for the next instrument, and Page Up, for the previous instrument.  The First and Last buttons take you to the beginning or end of the list of instruments. At top right, there is also a search facility. Click on the arrow for a drop-down list of instruments, scroll down, then click on the desired instrument.


User/Instruments.htm    03 November 2006             MENU -> Musicology -> Instruments