This musical instrument quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the whole orchestra and a good deal beyond it. You will meet the harpsichord maker who invented the piano, the Belgian who gave his name to the saxophone, the Russian physicist whose instrument is played without being touched, and the termites that hollow out didgeridoos. There are questions on how instruments are built, where they came from, who made them famous and the odd records they hold, from a 33,000-pipe organ in Atlantic City to a violin that sold for $15.9 million. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a school music class or family game night: how many keys on a piano, which family the flute belongs to, what a bagpipe's bag was traditionally made from. The rest climb through jazz, folk and world instruments to details only a working musician or a serious trivia player will know. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and the citation sits under each explanation, so you can settle the argument about whether a saxophone is a woodwind once and for all.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many keys does a standard modern piano have?
88
That is 52 white and 36 black. The Imperial Bösendorfer adds nine extra bass keys for a total of 97, giving it a full eight octaves.
Q 02Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano around 1700 while employed by the Medici as what?
Keeper of the Instruments
He was an expert harpsichord builder, and his innovation was hammers that strike the strings and fall away, letting the player control volume. Three of his pianos survive, all from the 1720s.
Q 03Which piano maker's Imperial model has 97 keys instead of the usual number?
Bösendorfer
The nine extra keys sit at the bass end and are often coloured black so pianists don't lose their bearings.
Q 04The saxophone is made of brass, yet it belongs to which family of instruments?
Woodwind
The single-reed mouthpiece is what counts, not the metal. Belgian maker Adolphe Sax patented it on 28 June 1846, hoping to combine brass projection with woodwind agility.
Q 05The saxophone was patented in 1846 by an instrument maker from which country?
Belgium
Adolphe Sax moved to Paris and spent much of his life in lawsuits with rivals over his patents. Military bands adopted the instrument long before jazz did.
Q 06The four strings of a violin are tuned in which interval?
Perfect fifths
From low to high the notes are G, D, A and E. The double bass is the odd one out in the string section, tuned in fourths.
Q 07The 'Lady Blunt' Stradivarius sold in 2011 for how much, a record for a violin at auction?
$15.9 million
The 1721 instrument was sold to raise money for Japanese earthquake relief. Blind tests since the 19th century have repeatedly failed to find that listeners prefer Strads over good modern violins.
Q 08Roughly how many of Antonio Stradivari's instruments are known to survive?
About 650
He made more than 1,100 in his Cremona workshop. Tree-ring analysis shows most soundboards came from Norway spruce grown high in the Alps.
Q 09The theremin, invented in 1920, is unusual because it is played how?
Without touching it
Two antennas sense the player's hands, one for pitch and one for volume. Russian physicist Lev Termen later spied for the Soviets in the US.
Q 10What instrument actually plays the touchless-sounding electronic part on the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'?
An Electro-Theremin
Trombonist Paul Tanner built the slide-controlled device, which is far easier to play in tune than the real thing.
Q 11Traditional didgeridoos are made from eucalyptus branches that have been hollowed out by what?
Termites
The insects eat only the dead heartwood; the living sapwood repels them. Players use circular breathing to keep the drone going for many minutes.
Q 12The Hawaiian word 'ukulele' roughly translates as what?
Jumping flea
Possibly a nod to the player's darting fingers. The instrument was developed in the 1880s from small guitars brought by Portuguese immigrants from Madeira.
Q 13The ukulele descends from small guitar-like instruments brought to Hawaii by immigrants from where?
Portugal
The machete, cavaquinho and rajão arrived from Madeira and the Azores. King Kalākaua's enthusiasm made it a fixture of royal gatherings.
Q 21The world's largest pipe organ, with 33,112 pipes, stands in a boardwalk hall in which New Jersey resort?
Atlantic City
Built between 1929 and 1932, its Grand Ophicleide stop hits 130 decibels at one metre. A hurricane in 1944 began decades of damage that a $16 million restoration is still repairing.
Q 22What powered the wind supply of Ctesibius's 3rd-century BC 'hydraulis', the first organ?
Water pressure
The medieval poet Guillaume de Machaut called the organ 'the king of instruments', a title it has kept.
Q 23In Hornbostel-Sachs classification, an instrument whose own body vibrates, like a triangle, is called what?
Idiophone
Q 14Which Roman emperor was described by Suetonius as a player of the tibia utricularis, an early bagpipe?
Nero
Bags were traditionally goat, sheep, cow or even dog skin.
Q 15Which instrument gives the orchestra its tuning note, a concert A?
Oboe
Its pitch is stable and its penetrating tone cuts through the hall. The name comes from the French hautbois, 'high-pitched woodwind'.
Q 16The oldest known musical instruments, found in caves in Germany, are flutes made from what?
Vulture bone and mammoth ivory
The Hohle Fels flute has five finger holes and is between 35,000 and 43,000 years old. A supposed older Neanderthal flute from Slovenia may just be a bone chewed by a hyena.
Q 17The Fender Stratocaster, introduced in 1954, traditionally carries how many pickups?
Three
The three single-coils and five-way switch, plus the contoured body, made it the template every rival copies. Hendrix, Clapton and Buddy Holly all played one.
Q 18The modern classical guitar's shape was settled around 1850 by makers from which country?
Spain
Antonio Torres Jurado is the name every luthier knows. The English word itself came via Spanish 'guitarra' from Andalusian Arabic and ultimately Greek.
Q 19What tune did the Gemini 6 astronauts play on harmonica and chimes in December 1965, the first instruments in space?
Jingle Bells
Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford first radioed a deadpan report of a 'satellite' in polar orbit piloted by a man in a red suit. The instruments are on display at the Smithsonian.
Q 20The dominant harmonica maker was founded in Trossingen in 1857 by a man in what trade?
Clockmaker
Matthias Hohner's firm still makes them there. Bob Dylan's neck rack let him play harmonica and guitar at once, a habit borrowed from folk singers before him.
The system was published in 1914; membranophones are drums, chordophones strings, aerophones winds. Sachs added electrophones as a fifth group in 1940.
Q 24The Hornbostel-Sachs system of classifying instruments was first published in which year?
1914
It appeared in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie and is modelled on library classification numbers, allowing more than 300 basic categories.
Q 25George Harrison played the sitar on which Beatles song, recorded in 1965?
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
He went on to study with Ravi Shankar, who had been introducing the instrument to Western audiences since the late 1950s. A sitar can carry up to 21 strings, most of them sympathetic.
Q 26Roughly how many strings, including sympathetic ones, can a sitar have in total?
Eighteen to twenty-one
Only six or seven are actually played; the rest ring in sympathy. The resonating chamber is traditionally a calabash gourd.
Q 27How does a trumpet player actually produce the sound?
Vibrating the lips in the mouthpiece
The buzz sets up a standing wave in the tubing. A standard B-flat trumpet has about 1.48 metres of it, and three valves add extra lengths to lower the pitch.
Q 28Since 1971 the players' international society has recommended calling the 'French horn' simply what?
The horn
The modern instrument is largely German in design. Players still control pitch and tone by how far they push a hand into the bell.
Q 29The Italian word 'violoncello', shortened to cello, literally means what?
Little violone
The violone was the bass of the viol family. Cellos are tuned C, G, D, A, an octave below the viola, and Bach's six unaccompanied suites are the instrument's scripture.
Q 30The double bass differs from the rest of the orchestral string family in being tuned in which interval?
Fourths
E, A, D, G, the same as a bass guitar and the low four strings of an ordinary guitar. Bluegrass and rockabilly players slap the strings against the fingerboard for percussion.