Identify the Musical Instrument Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

This is a small wooden board or hollow box fitted with a row of thin metal tongues of different lengths, fixed at one end and free at the other. The player holds it in both hands and plucks the free ends with the thumbnails. It is also known as a thumb piano.

Question 2

This is a small round hand-held hoop with pairs of little metal jingles set into slots in the rim, and sometimes a skin stretched over one side. It is shaken for a sustained shimmer, tapped against the hand or knee, or rubbed with a wet thumb for a buzzing roll.

Question 3

This slim, silver-coloured metal tube is held out sideways and sounded by blowing across a hole near one end, not into a mouthpiece. The player opens and closes a row of padded keys with the fingers. It is the highest of the common woodwinds and has a clear, airy tone.

Question 4

This curved metal instrument has a single reed clamped to its mouthpiece, a cone-shaped brass body, many keys worked by both hands, and a wide bell that turns up at the end. Invented in the 1840s, it became one of the defining sounds of jazz.

Question 5

This tall, roughly triangular instrument holds dozens of strings of different lengths inside its frame. The player leans it back against one shoulder and plucks with the fingers and thumbs of both hands, while seven foot pedals shift the tuning so every note can be reached.

Question 6

This small instrument has a round or teardrop-shaped body and eight strings arranged in four pairs, each pair tuned to the same note. It is played with a pick, often with a fast trembling stroke to make a note sing. It is common in Italian folk music and American bluegrass.

Question 7

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.

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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.