Idiophones: What are they?
Idiophones are instruments which create a sound after they are hit, struck, or scraped which causes them to vibrate. If you immediately are thinking "this must be all of our drums", then you're on the right track, but not completely correct.
Most of our drums will fall into the next category which we will discuss called membranophones, but a lot of our secondary percussion instruments that our drummers get to use are in fact idiophones.
A good example to demonstrate this group is our drum cymbals. They don't make a sound on their own, but as soon as the drummer hits them, it causes the entire cymbal to move, and a sound is created. Other examples in our classroom are things like our wind chimes, the triangle, and our big xylophone. They all have to be hit with something (either a mallet, stick, or even the human hand) to produce a sound.
Most of our drums will fall into the next category which we will discuss called membranophones, but a lot of our secondary percussion instruments that our drummers get to use are in fact idiophones.
A good example to demonstrate this group is our drum cymbals. They don't make a sound on their own, but as soon as the drummer hits them, it causes the entire cymbal to move, and a sound is created. Other examples in our classroom are things like our wind chimes, the triangle, and our big xylophone. They all have to be hit with something (either a mallet, stick, or even the human hand) to produce a sound.
So what other factors can affect the sound of Idiophones?
So while they all share the common fact that they need to be hit, these instruments can all sound drastically different from one another. That's because like with all instruments there are several other aspects which determine how they will sound. Two of these key aspects are:
- Material: Idiophones can be made of all kinds of different things, such as metal, wood, and bone, and each will have a particular timbre or tonal colour which makes it sound unique.
- Size: If we look to the left at the drum cymbals, we see that they come in a range of different sizes, and if we look at the xylophone above, each "key" is also a different size. Since the sound in idiophones is created by the object moving itself, the bigger or smaller and thicker a thinner it is will affect what sound is produced. A general rule of thumb is that bigger it is, the lower a sound it will generate.