Chordophone

What it means

Chordophone is the technical term for instruments whose sound is produced by one or more taut, vibrating strings. The term comes from the instrument classification system developed in 1914 by Erich Moritz von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs, which sorts all instruments by their sound-producing mechanism into four main groups: chordophones (string instruments), aerophones (wind instruments), membranophones (drums), and idiophones (instruments whose own body vibrates).

Musical use

Chordophones include very different designs: plucked instruments such as the guitar, harp, and lute, bowed instruments such as the violin and cello, keyboard instruments with strings such as the piano and harpsichord, and struck string instruments such as the hammered dulcimer. What they share is purely the sound-producing principle, not the playing technique.

A chordophone should be distinguished from an idiophone, where the sounding body itself vibrates (like a bell), and from a membranophone, where a stretched membrane produces the sound. The classification says nothing about whether an instrument is plucked, bowed, or struck.

Performance practice

The term is mainly useful in comparative organology: when classifying instruments from different cultures, ask what actually vibrates to produce the sound — for a chordophone, it is always the string, regardless of the instrument's shape or origin.