Experimental musical instrument Experimental musical instrument An experimental musical instrument (or custom-made instrument) is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modifications, such as cracked drum cymbals or metal objects inserted between piano strings in a prepared piano. Some experimental instruments are created from household items like a homemade mute for brass instruments such as bathtub plugs. Other experimental instruments are created from electronic spare parts, or by mixing acoustic instruments with electric components. The instruments created by the earliest 20th-century builders
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