Electronic musical instrument actual musical instruments is often unclear. In the 2010s, electronic musical instruments are now widely used in most styles of music. In popular music styles such as electronic dance music, almost all of the instrument sounds used in recordings are electronic instruments (e.g., bass synth, synthesizer, drum machine). Development of new electronic musical instruments, controllers, and synthesizers continues to be a highly active and interdisciplinary field of research. Specialized conferences, notably the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, have organized to report cutting-edge work, as well as to provide a showcase for artists who perform or create music
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