Horn (instrument) a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts. Variations include: As the name indicates, people originally used to blow on the actual horns of animals before starting to emulate them in metal or other materials. This original usage survives in the shofar (), a ram's horn, which plays an important role in Jewish religious rituals. The genus of animal-horn instruments to which the shofar belongs is called ("keren") in Hebrew, "qarnu" in Akkadian, and ("keras") in Greek. The "olifant" or "oliphant" (an abbreviation of the French "cor d'olifant"/"oliphant", "elephant horn") was the name applied in
Horn (instrument) into a single hoop (or sometimes a double hoop), is the ancestor of the modern orchestral and band horns. Beginning in the early 18th century, the player could change key by adding crooks to change the length of tubing. It is essentially a hunting horn, with its pitch controlled by air speed, aperture (opening of the lips through which air passes) and the use of the right hand moving in and out of the bell. Today it is played as a period instrument. The natural horn can only play from a single harmonic series at a time because there is