Ethnomusicology

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18. Instrument collections

Membranophones

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Drums and idiophones, instruments whose sound comes from the vibration of the rigid material they are made of, were long grouped together in the “percussion” family. This term referred to an empirical classification inherited from antique symbolic thinking, which divided musical instruments into three categories: string, wind and percussion.

Research in this field since the nineteenth century has shown the inadequacy of this approach and developed a universally applicable classification system based solely on the instruments’ acoustic functioning. Drums are now put in a separate class known as membranophones.

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