You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
3.3.8Electrophones: Definition, How They Work, and List of Instruments
If a musical instrument does not require electricity to produce its sound, you can almost always classify it as an idiophone, membranophone, aerophone, or chordophone.
After that, it gets tricky.
Keyboard instruments in which sounds are produced wholly by electronic oscillators are practically always considered electrophones.
Nailing down what other kinds of instruments constitute electrophones poses all sorts of problems:
- An electric guitar is usually considered a chordophone. But whether that would apply to purely digital electric guitars is contentious.
- Same applies to other instruments that look like acoustic instruments, or something like acoustic instruments, but produce sound by digital means, and may or may not mimic the sounds of acoustic instruments.
- Technically, samplers and turntables would be considered electrophones, even though much of the “sound of origin” is acoustic.
- Electronic devices used for sound generation, sound processing, and sound playback are widely “played” live by musicians, and would never previously have even been considered musical instruments—mixers and computers, for example. Here, the line between musical instruments and electronic sound shapers or processors gets infinitely fuzzy.