How Many Musical Instruments Are There?
The orchestra says four families. Musicology says five categories. World traditions add thousands more named instruments. And the oldest one we have is 43,000 years old.
Quick Answer
There is no agreed total. The Western orchestra uses 4 families (woodwind, brass, strings, percussion). Musicologists use the 5 Hornbostel-Sachs categories, which include the orchestra plus electrophones — synthesisers, electric guitars, drum machines. Counting every distinct named instrument across world traditions runs to several thousand.
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Launch HowManyBeatsThe Four Orchestral Families
Each family has its own sub-hub, complete with a Web Audio sound lab and links to every member instrument.
Woodwind
Flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, saxophone and recorder — five guides plus a live Sound Lab demonstrating edge tone vs single reed vs double reed.
Open woodwind hub →Strings
Violin, guitar, harp, mandolin, banjo, ukulele — bowed, plucked and struck, plus a Web Audio Action Lab and six free string tuners.
Open strings hub →Brass
Trumpet, French horn, trombone, tuba and bugle — with a live Sound Lab playing a fanfare in each instrument's actual register.
Open brass hub →Percussion
300+ percussion instruments worldwide — and our free HowManyBeats 16-step drum machine.
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The Hornbostel-Sachs system: five categories
The Western orchestra splits instruments into four families, but musicologists worldwide use a different, more precise system. Erich von Hornbostel (German, 1877–1935) and Curt Sachs (German, 1881–1959) published it in 1914 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. Their key insight: classify by how the sound is made, not by what the instrument is made of or which orchestral chair it sits in. That move puts the brass-bodied saxophone with the woodwinds and the wooden didgeridoo with the brass.
1. Idiophones
Sound from the instrument's own solid material vibrating, without strings or membranes.
Examples: Xylophone, cymbals, triangle, castanets, marimba.
2. Membranophones
Sound from a tightly stretched membrane vibrating across a resonator.
Examples: Snare drum, timpani, congas, bongos, tambourine.
3. Chordophones
Sound from stretched strings vibrating between fixed points.
Examples: Violin, guitar, piano, harp, cello.
4. Aerophones
Sound from vibrating air, without strings or membranes.
Examples: Flute, trumpet, clarinet, pipe organ, recorder.
5. Electrophones
A later addition. Sound produced or significantly modified by electrical means.
Examples: Synthesiser, Theremin, electric guitar, drum machine.
Electrophones were added to the original four-category system in 1940, after Curt Sachs published The History of Musical Instruments. They didn't really exist in 1914.
The oldest instrument is 43,000 years old
In 2008 and 2009, Nicholas J. Conard and his team from the University of Tübingen excavated bone fragments from the Hohle Fels and Geißenklösterle caves in the Swabian Jura, southwestern Germany. The pieces reassembled into recognisable flutes — carved from the wing bones of griffon vultures and from mammoth ivory, with finger holes spaced for melodic playing. The discovery was published in Nature in 2009. Revised radiocarbon work by Tom Higham and colleagues in 2012 dated the earliest examples to approximately 42,000 to 43,000 years old.
The Swabian flutes are by some margin the oldest undisputed musical instruments ever found. They are edge-tone aerophones — direct ancestors of every modern flute. Music is older than agriculture, older than written language, older than the wheel. Before our ancestors made pots, they made flutes.
By contrast, some of our most familiar instruments are surprisingly recent. The piano was invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori, keeper of instruments at the Medici court in Florence. He called it the gravicembalo col piano e forte — the harpsichord with soft and loud — because his hammer mechanism, unlike the harpsichord's plucking jacks, let the player control dynamics with finger pressure. The saxophone arrived in 1846. The Moog synthesiser arrived in 1964.
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Sources
- Erich M. von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, "Systematik der Musikinstrumente: Ein Versuch" (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol. 46, 1914). English translation by Anthony Baines and Klaus P. Wachsmann (Galpin Society Journal, vol. 14, 1961).
- Curt Sachs, The History of Musical Instruments (W. W. Norton, 1940) — the addition of electrophones as a fifth category.
- Nicholas J. Conard, Maria Malina and Susanne C. Münzel, "New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany" (Nature, vol. 460, 2009) — discovery of the Swabian Jura bone flutes.
- Thomas Higham et al., "Τesting models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: the radiocarbon chronology of Geißenklösterle" (Journal of Human Evolution, 2012) — the 42,000–43,000-year date range.
- Anthony Baines, The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (OUP, 1992) — the standard general reference.
- Stewart Pollens, The Early Pianoforte (CUP, 1995) — Cristofori's surviving instruments and the invention of the piano.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Department of Musical Instruments — online catalogue of historical instruments from all five Hornbostel-Sachs categories.
Keep exploring
Forty-three thousand years of humans turning hollow tubes and stretched strings into music. The family is still growing.