Aerophone

What it means

Aerophone is an instrument class from the classification system devised by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, which groups musical instruments by how they produce sound. In aerophones, vibrating air itself generates the tone, rather than a solid vibrating string, membrane, or other body being the primary sound source.

This class includes all wind instruments: flutes, where an air stream is split against an edge, reed instruments such as the clarinet and oboe, brass instruments such as the trumpet and horn, where the player's lips set the air vibrating, as well as organ pipes and the accordion.

In the notation

Aerophone is a classification term from organology and has no notation of its own. Aerophones follow the same notation conventions as other instruments of their respective family, including transposed notation for many brass and woodwind instruments.

Musical use

The division into aerophones, chordophones (string instruments), membranophones (drums), and idiophones (instruments that sound through their own solid body) mainly serves the scholarly and museological classification of instruments from around the world, independent of culture or construction. It allows very differently built instruments, such as a European transverse flute, an African horn, or an Asian mouth organ, to be compared systematically, since in each case vibrating air ultimately produces the tone.

Within the aerophone class, further distinctions are often made, for instance whether the air is set vibrating by the player's lips, a reed, an edge, or mechanically, as in the organ.