Family of musical instruments


A family of musical instruments is a grouping of several different but related sizes or types of instruments. Some schemes of musical instrument classification, such as the Hornbostel-Sachs system, are based on a hierarchy of instrument families and families of families. Orchestral instruments are classified as families based on their commonalities.
Some commonly recognized families are:
Some less common families are:
The keyboard family can also be referenced, though it is not an authentic instrument family. Rather, it is a common design format for instrument interfaces. There are many types of instruments in the keyboard family, such as string, brass, woodwind, percussion, electronic, digital, idiophone, and more.
Instruments can also be classified by audio generation method. There are chordophones, membranophones, idiophones, aerophones, electrophones, plasmaphones, and hydraulophones. These are typically not used by everyday people or musicians, however.
Family relationships are not always clear-cut. For example, some authorities regard families as encompassing only instruments of different pitch range that have similar construction and tone quality. They therefore, for example, do not regard the cor anglais as a member of the oboe family, because its narrow bore and piriform bell give it a distinctly different tone quality from the oboe.