# Talk:Atonal instrument
Instruments and non-instruments
I'm not convinced that it makes much sense to single out whistles as “not instruments”. While whistles are not handled by music.c, neither are bells. Also, there aren't really any useful properties shared by atonal instruments, so I'm not sure what excluding whistles is supposed to achieve. I don't really care that much; it just seems odd to see whistles explicitly listed as not instruments when this classification has no real basis in the source code, and no real effect. -- Killian 12:23, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I had a thought: elven players are generated with a random non-magical instrument, and while bells and leather drums are eligible, tin whistles are not. So I guess there's at least one useful distinction after all. -- Killian 12:34, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
You could be right, but musical instrument[1] does not class them as instruments. I hadn't noticed about bells. It was mainly a consistency thing, and this was the easiest change to make, which also conformed to my personal prejudices. Investigating more, I note that tool-343.txt and Tool class them as instruments. Maybe it should be changed back here and added to musical instrument. Or we could just merge some of these pages...

↑ I did edit this page, but whistles weren't there before

--Rogerb-on-NAO 14:12, 10 July 2008 (UTC)