Identify the Musical Instrument Quiz — 10 Free Questions

Question 1

This long-necked plucked instrument from northern India has a large gourd body, tall curved metal frets that can be slid along the neck, and a second set of thin wires beneath the main strings that vibrate on their own to add a shimmering ring. Its bridge gives it a buzzing tone.

Question 2

These are large bowl-shaped drums, usually two to five of them, each a copper or fibreglass basin with a skin stretched over the open top. A foot pedal tightens or loosens the skin to change the pitch, and they are struck with felt-tipped sticks. They bring thunder and drama to the orchestra.

Question 3

This is a long wooden tube, often between one and two metres, sounded by buzzing loosely vibrating lips at one end to make a low, continuous drone. Skilled players breathe in through the nose while still pushing air out with the cheeks, so the sound never breaks. It is a traditional instrument of Aboriginal Australians.

Question 4

This is a giant keyboard instrument, often built into the wall of a church or hall, that makes sound by pushing air through hundreds or thousands of tuned tubes of different sizes. The player sits at a console with two to five keyboards, a set of foot pedals, and knobs that switch whole sets of tubes in or out.

Question 5

This shallow Irish frame drum, 25 to 65 cm across, has a goatskin head and an open back that one hand can press against from behind to change the pitch and tone. The other hand strikes the front with a short, double-ended wooden beater called a tipper or cipin. It is central to Irish traditional music.

Question 6

This brass instrument is a tight coil of narrow tubing ending in a very wide opening that points backwards, away from the audience. The player keeps one hand cupped inside that opening and works three rotary valves. Its tone is warm and rounded, and it is famously hard to play cleanly.

Question 7

This is a short-necked, fret-less lute with a deep rounded back like half a pear, a pegbox that bends sharply backwards, and usually 11 strings arranged in pairs. It is plucked with a long thin plectrum and is the central string instrument of Arabic, Turkish and Persian music.

Question 8

This Chinese flute is made of bamboo and held sideways, played across a blow hole like a Western flute. What makes it unusual is one extra hole covered by a thin membrane of reed or bamboo skin, which buzzes as the instrument is played and gives it a bright, slightly nasal, ringing tone.

Question 9

These are tall, narrow, barrel-shaped Cuban hand drums, usually played in sets of two or three of slightly different sizes and pitches, standing on the floor or on a rack in front of the player. They are central to salsa, rumba and Latin jazz.

Question 10

This large tuned percussion instrument has rows of wooden bars laid out like a piano keyboard, each bar sitting above a metal tube that makes it resonate. It is struck with soft yarn-covered beaters, often two in each hand, and has a mellow, woody sound. Its roots are in Africa and Central America.

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Identify the Musical Instrument

Can you name the instrument? Each question shows a photograph of a musical instrument and gives three short, easy sentences about it: how it is played, what family it belongs to, and where it comes from, without ever saying its name. You then pick it from four choices, and the answer fills in the rest.

The instruments come from all over the world. Some are the standard voices of a Western orchestra, like the violin, the cello, the flute and the trumpet. Some are the backbone of pop and jazz, like the drum kit, the saxophone and the acoustic guitar. And many are the signature sound of one place: the sitar and tabla of northern India, the djembe of West Africa, the bagpipes of Scotland, the erhu of China, the didgeridoo of Aboriginal Australia, the balalaika of Russia, the accordion of European and Latin American dance halls.

Part of the fun is learning to place an instrument by how it works. Is it bowed, plucked or struck? Does it have a reed, a mouthpiece for buzzing lips, or a hole to blow across? Does it make one note at a time or many at once? Is it tuned with pegs, pedals, valves or paste? These few questions will usually narrow a mystery instrument down to a small handful.

A lot of these instruments have travelled and changed. The banjo and the marimba both grew from instruments carried across the Atlantic by enslaved Africans. The guitar, the piano and the accordion were each pinned down to their modern form by a single maker or workshop in the 1700s or 1800s. Several folk instruments were later rebuilt into standardised concert families so that whole orchestras could be formed from them.

The clues never name the instrument or use a word that would instantly give it away, so getting the answer means recognising the shape and the description rather than reading a label. Every photograph is a freely licensed image from Wikimedia Commons, chosen from public-domain or Creative Commons sources so there is no copyright question, and every fact has been checked. The language is kept simple, so the quiz plays the same for a trained musician and for someone who has never picked up an instrument.