Musical instrument Musical instrument A musical instrument is an instrument created or adapted to make musical sounds. In principle, any object that produces sound can be considered a musical instrument—it is through purpose that the object becomes a musical instrument. The history of musical instruments dates to the beginnings of human culture. Early musical instruments may have been used for ritual, such as a trumpet to signal success on the hunt, or a drum in a religious ceremony. Cultures eventually developed composition and performance of melodies for entertainment. Musical instruments evolved in step with changing applications. The date and origin of the
Synthetic instrument instrument synthesizer synthesizes the sound of specific instruments from generic hardware. Of course, a significant difference in these concepts is that musical instrument synthesizers typically only generate musical sound, whereas a synthetic instrument in test and measurement may be equally likely to generate or to measure some signal or parameter. A similar term commonly used in test and measurement, Virtual instrumentation, is a superset of synthetic instrumentation. All synthetic instruments are virtual instruments; however, the two terms are different when virtual instrument software mirrors and augments non-generic instrument hardware, providing a soft front panel, or managing the data flow to