The History of Musical Instruments

Music and musical instruments are used to create sounds that are pleasing to hear and anything that produces sounds serves as musical instruments. Music has always been part of our cultural heritage and different types of instruments have evolved during the ages.

The origin of the first musical instruments dates back from ancient times and historians have found artifacts to be early flutes which are about 37000 years old. Various musical instruments developed in different parts of the world and with the rapid growth of civilization these instruments spread from their place of origin to far and wide.

In the Middle age period various instruments that had originated from one country were found in anointer region of the world. And this way the different cultures started sharing their music with each other.

Archaeologists found a bone carving that resembled and worked like a flute and it was proved that diatonic notes could easily be played on it. So we can say for sure that the flutes were the oldest known musical instruments.

There are many different types of instruments that were discovered later on like harps, lyres and cymbals. Plus a cylindrical pipe with three side holes was also discovered and resembled the bagpipes.

In olden days many cultures also assigned ritual functions to their musical instruments and because of this more and more precision instruments were developed and ribbon reed, flutes and trumpets evolved. The drums were used in religious rituals in the African and Russian cultures in the early days.

This led to the development of instruments for producing melodious sounds as before this melody was only associated with singing. The earliest form of melody was produced by pounding and stampeding tubes and drums which produced different sounds and notes. One would answer with a clear sound while the other note was a little darker. These paired instruments were called Bullroarers, skin drums and Shell trumpets. And the ancient people associated genders with the paired instruments and the bigger and energetic the instrument was called the father while the smaller and dull sound producing instruments was called the mother.

The early Xylophone originated in South East Asia and there were many other forms of musical instruments that evolved at different times in different cultures and civilizations spread all over the world. The popular instruments that are played in this era have somehow evolved from the different instruments whose development focused on effectiveness and skill.

Some cultures preferred playing with stringed instruments and this is the reason innumerable varieties of differ types of harps and lyres are depicted in many of the paintings found on the cave walls and these became the forerunner of the modern version of stringed instruments like the violin. The Greek and Roman musical instruments were simple and nearly all of them were originally from other cultures.

So we can truly say that music and musical instruments have always been part of our cultural heritage.

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