100 Fun Facts About Music Trivia for Kids

How many keys does a piano have?

88, made up of 52 white keys and 36 black ones. Pressing any of them flicks a felt-covered hammer against the strings inside, so a piano is really a box of strings that you play by hitting them.

How many strings does a normal guitar have?

Six. For centuries guitars had only four or five pairs of strings; the sixth was added in the late 1700s, around the time the pairs gave way to single strings.

Which is the smallest and highest-sounding instrument in the orchestra's string family?

The violin. Folk players call it a fiddle, yet it is usually the very same instrument: only the style of music changes the name.

Which is the biggest and lowest-sounding string instrument in an orchestra?

The double bass. Orchestra players mostly stroke its thick strings with a bow, but in a jazz band it is almost always plucked with the fingers instead.

Which drum in a drum kit does the drummer play with a foot pedal?

The bass drum. Stepping on the pedal swings a stick into the big drum on the floor, so the drummer's hands stay free to play everything else.

The trumpet belongs to which family of instruments?

Brass. The sound starts with the player's own lips, which buzz against the cup-shaped mouthpiece; the metal tube only turns that buzz into a bright note.

The flute belongs to which family of instruments?

Woodwind. A flute still counts even when it is made of silver, because the family is defined by how the sound is made, by blowing across a hole or past a reed, not by what the tube is made of.

What is the person who stands in front of an orchestra and waves a stick called?

A conductor. The stick is called a baton, and it caught on because players at the back could see it more easily than the bare hands or rolled-up paper that leaders used to wave.

Which instrument belongs to an orchestra's percussion section?

The cymbals. Percussion covers whatever is struck or shaken, yet when the modern orchestra took shape in the 1700s the whole section was just a pair of kettledrums played by one musician.

Which composer could already play keyboard and fiddle, and had started composing, by the age of five?

Mozart. Soon afterwards his father took him and his sister Nannerl to play at the royal courts in Munich and Vienna, the first of many tours that showed the children off across Europe.

Which famous composer kept writing music even after he started to go deaf?

Beethoven. By the first performance of his Ninth Symphony he was so deaf that, in one famous telling, a singer had to turn him round so he could see the audience cheering.

Which children's song became the most-viewed YouTube video of all time in 2020?

Baby Shark. For decades it was just a summer-camp singalong that nobody owned, until the children's brand Pinkfong made the dance video that overtook 'Despacito'.

Which character sings 'Let It Go' in Frozen?

Elsa. She was written as a villain in early drafts, but once the songwriters handed in 'Let It Go' the filmmakers felt for her so much that they rewrote her as a heroine.

Which song's tune began as 'Good Morning to All', a greeting sung in a Kentucky kindergarten?

Happy Birthday to You. The tune is credited to sisters Patty and Mildred Hill, who published it in 1893 as an easy song for small children; the birthday words were fitted to it later.

Which nursery rhyme shares the alphabet song's tune?

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. 'Baa, Baa, Black Sheep' uses it too: the melody is an old French song, and the star words began as a poem by Jane Taylor that was only later set to it.

What style of music did Taylor Swift start out singing?

Country. When she was a young teenager her family moved from Pennsylvania to a town just outside Nashville, purely so she could chase a record deal in the home of the genre.

Which song was the first single from Taylor Swift's album 1989, her first official pop record?

Shake It Off. She wrote it as a cheerful reply to the people who picked on her in the press, and put it out ahead of 1989, the album she named after the year she was born.

Olivia Rodrigo starred as Nini in a Disney+ series spun off from which film?

High School Musical. Rodrigo wrote the song 'All I Want' herself for a 2019 episode of the series, an early taste of the songwriting that would soon make her a pop star.

Who writes and produces most of Billie Eilish's songs with her?

Her brother Finneas. He wrote 'Ocean Eyes' for his own band, then asked his younger sister to sing it instead, and the recording they put online launched her career.

Where did Bruno Mars grow up?

Hawaii. From the age of four he performed in Honolulu with his parents' band, the Love Notes, and his Elvis Presley impression made him a local star.

Which song sung by Bruno Mars did Billboard rank as America's biggest hit of the 2010s?

Uptown Funk. Officially it is producer Mark Ronson's record with Mars as the guest singer, and it sat at number one in America for 14 weeks in a row.

Which girl group did Beyoncé front before going solo?

Destiny's Child. The group started out as Girl's Tyme and lost on the TV talent show Star Search; only after Beyoncé's father took over as manager did a new name and a record deal follow.

Where does the boy band BTS come from?

South Korea. A music producer began picking the seven 'Bulletproof Boy Scouts' for their singing, rapping and dancing in 2010, three years before their first release.

Which song was BTS's first recorded fully in English?

Dynamite. Switching languages paid off at once: the disco-pop single entered America's Hot 100 at number one, the band's first chart-topper there.

Where does Ed Sheeran come from?

England. He grew up in the Suffolk town of Framlingham, then moved to London as a teenager and played hundreds of shows in small clubs before any record label signed him.

Which Disney Channel show made Sabrina Carpenter famous before her music career took off?

Girl Meets World. She played best friend Maya Hart for three years and was already making records for Disney's own label, yet pop stardom only arrived after the show had ended.

Which song from KPop Demon Hunters topped America's singles chart in the summer of 2025?

Golden. Its singers Rumi, Mira and Zoey are cartoon characters, yet the song spent weeks at number one on the real Hot 100, credited to the film's made-up group Huntrix.

Which English city were The Beatles from?

Liverpool. John, Paul and George had been playing its clubs together for years before the band took its name in 1960, and Ringo, the last to join, only arrived in 1962.

Which Beatles song ends with a long 'na na na' sing-along?

Hey Jude. It began life as 'Hey Jules', which Paul McCartney is said to have made up in the car to comfort John Lennon's young son Julian while his parents were splitting up.

In Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' music video, what does he dance with?

Zombies. Hollywood director John Landis shot the 14-minute video like a short horror film, in which Jackson himself turns into a monster before the dead climb out of their graves to dance.

Which game's theme first entered the National Recording Registry?

Super Mario Bros. Composer Koji Kondo wrote the bouncy, Latin-flavoured tune in 1985 for a console whose sound chip could manage only a handful of bleeps at once.

In The Sound of Music, who plays Maria and teaches the children 'Do-Re-Mi'?

Julie Andrews. The real Maria and her family never hiked over the Alps as the film's ending shows: they simply caught a train to Italy in plain sight, telling people they were off to sing in America.

Who wrote the songs for Disney's Encanto, including 'We Don't Talk About Bruno'?

Lin-Manuel Miranda. Oscar song entries closed before the film had even opened, and Disney put forward a different Encanto song, months before Bruno went to number one in America.

Which small four-stringed instrument was made popular on the islands of the Pacific?

It was based on little guitars brought to Hawaii by Portuguese immigrants in the 1880s.

Which is the largest and lowest instrument played with buzzing lips?

The tuba. It is also a latecomer: two men in Berlin only patented it in 1835, centuries after horns and trombones were first played.

Which curved metal instrument is played with a single reed?

The saxophone. Belgian maker Adolphe Sax patented it in Paris in 1846 and it still carries his name, but it only found its true home decades later, when jazz bands took it up.

What are the bars of a xylophone made of?

Wood. The name is built from the Greek words for 'wood' and 'sound', so the bright metal-barred toys sold as xylophones are strictly glockenspiels.

What is the small metal rod used to strike a triangle called?

A beater. The triangle hangs from a loop of thread so it can ring freely, and one corner is left open on purpose, which blurs its note into a shimmer instead of one clear pitch.

Which instrument do many children learn first at school, often a plastic one?

The recorder. It was a favourite 300 years ago, then all but vanished for well over a century until early-music enthusiasts revived it in the twentieth century.

The harmonica is also called what?

A mouth organ. Each hole hides a pair of tiny metal reeds, one that sounds when you blow and one when you suck, so a single hole can give two different notes.

The bagpipes are most famous in which part of the United Kingdom?

Scotland. The bag is the clever part: the piper keeps it squeezed under one arm, so the pipes go on sounding without a gap while the player snatches a breath.

Where does the didgeridoo, a long drone pipe, come from?

Australia. Aboriginal makers in the north do not drill the pipe themselves: they look for a eucalyptus trunk or branch that termites have already eaten hollow.

How do you play a kazoo?

By humming into it. Blowing gets you nowhere: a kazoo makes no note of its own, and its thin membrane just buzzes along with whatever your voice does.

What does a metronome do?

Clicks at a steady beat. The wind-up ticker is usually credited to Johann Maelzel, who patented it in 1815, but he had borrowed the idea from a Dutch rival, Dietrich Winkel.

What is a group of singers called?

A choir. What sets it apart from a few friends singing is numbers: more than one singer shares each part, so nobody has to carry a line alone.

What does the word 'tempo' mean?

How fast a song goes. The word is simply Italian for 'time', and since Italian was the language of most composers when such markings caught on, players still follow words like andante and presto.

Which note does the curl of the treble clef wrap around on the staff?

G. The treble clef began as a fancy letter G, which is why musicians also call it the G-clef, and its curl still circles the line where that note sits.

What was the name of Olivia Rodrigo's first single, released in January 2021?

Drivers License. The heartbreak ballad went straight to number one in America and set Spotify's one-day record for a non-holiday song, turning a 17-year-old into a pop star almost overnight.

Which song did Sabrina Carpenter release in April 2024, a day before her first Coachella set?

Espresso. It stalled at number three in America and it was her next single that reached number one, yet 'Espresso' was the one that went on to win her a Grammy.

In Disney's Encanto, which member of the Madrigal family sings 'Surface Pressure'?

Luisa. The songwriter, the baby of his own family, has called her song a love letter and an apology to his big sister, who carried burdens he never had to.

The bow used to play a cello is traditionally strung with hair from the tail of which animal?

Horse hair is stretched along the bow and rubbed with rosin, a resin from pine trees, which adds the friction the hair needs to grip the strings and make them sound.

The Grammy Award trophy is a small gold-plated model of which old-fashioned music player?

A gramophone gave the award its name as well as its shape: the organizers' original idea was to call the prizes the Gramophone Awards.

The catchy theme music of the video game Tetris is based on a folk song from which nation?

Russia is the home of Korobeiniki, a nineteenth-century folk song about a peddler, which became the game's signature tune after Nintendo's Game Boy version used it.

When a piano key is pressed, what strikes the strings inside to make the sound?

Felt-covered hammers hit the strings, and the harder a key is pressed, the harder the hammer strikes and the louder the note sounds.

Pharrell Williams's cheerful hit Happy first appeared on the soundtrack of which animated film?

Despicable Me 2 launched Happy, which went on to become the best-selling song of 2014 in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

In Disney's 1940 film Fantasia, which cartoon character plays the Sorcerer's Apprentice?

Mickey Mouse plays the apprentice to music the French composer Paul Dukas finished in 1897, in a segment Walt Disney first planned as a separate short film.

In Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, which animal is represented by a clarinet playing in a low register?

The cat is played by a clarinet, in a piece Prokofiev wrote in 1936 to introduce children to the individual instruments of the orchestra.

Which instrument does Kermit the Frog play while singing Rainbow Connection in The Muppet Movie?

Banjo in hand, Kermit sits alone on a log in the swamp for the opening number, which was performed by his creator, Jim Henson.

Which nursery tune is often played by jack-in-the-box toys and by ice cream trucks?

Pop Goes the Weasel suits the toy well: many boxes are built so the lid springs open at the point in the melody where the first word of the title is sung.

Which Queen song, written by guitarist Brian May, runs on a stomp-stomp-clap beat instead of drums?

We Will Rock You got its beat when the band stomped on a studio drum riser and clapped, then layered the recordings to sound like a huge crowd.

Which Italian word in sheet music tells musicians to play loudly, the opposite of the marking piano?

Forte means loud, and the piano's original Italian name, pianoforte, came from a description of a keyboard that could play both soft and loud.

Which musical symbol, which looks a lot like a hashtag, raises a note by a half step?

A sharp can sit beside a single note or in the key signature at the start of the music, where it changes every note of that name.

Which musical symbol, drawn as a hollow oval with no stem, lasts for four beats in 4/4 time?

Whole note is the American name; British musicians call it a semibreve, and it lasts as long as two half notes or four quarter notes.

Which is the highest type of singing voice, named after the Italian word for 'above'?

Soprano singers have the highest range of any voice type, and in four-part harmony their line often carries the melody.

Which musical term for getting gradually louder is drawn as a hairpin shape that opens to the right?

Crescendo signs are nicknamed hairpins or wedges, and the mirror-image sign that closes toward the right tells players to get gradually quieter.

What is the gap between a note and the next note of the same name, such as C to C, called?

An octave takes its name from the Latin for eighth, and the higher of its two notes vibrates exactly twice as fast as the lower one.

What is a song like Row, Row, Row Your Boat called when groups start the same tune at different times?

A round has every group sing exactly the same melody, yet the staggered entries overlap and still fit together in harmony.

Which kind of theater show, first staged in Florence in the 1590s, tells a story by singing instead of speaking?

Opera grew from works such as Jacopo Peri's Dafne, produced in Florence in 1598, and its singers switch between speech-like passages and solo songs called arias.

Which term describes singing with no instruments at all, the style that made the group Pentatonix famous?

A cappella is Italian for in the style of the chapel, and some groups use their voices to imitate drums and other instruments.

Which word do musicians use for how high or low a note sounds, as opposed to how loud it is?

Pitch is set almost entirely by how quickly the sound makes the air vibrate: rapid vibrations sound high and slower ones sound low.

Which instrument changes notes with a long telescoping slide instead of the valves found on similar horns?

Trombone comes from Italian words meaning large trumpet, and a version with three valves in place of the slide also exists.

Which double-reed instrument plays the note A that a whole orchestra tunes to before a concert?

Oboe players give the tuning note because the instrument holds its note securely and its penetrating sound carries across the whole orchestra.

Which tall concert instrument typically has 47 strings, plucked by hand, and seven pedals at its base?

Harp pedals change the notes of the strings so the player can perform in any key, and each of the seven pedals retunes every string of one note name at once.

Which large copper-bowled drums, also known as kettledrums, can be tuned to exact notes with a foot pedal?

Timpani have a skin stretched over a large bowl, and the pedal changes the tension of the whole skin at once to raise or lower the note.

The sitar, a long-necked instrument made famous worldwide by Ravi Shankar, comes from which nation?

India is where the sitar took its present form in the 19th century, and in the 1960s it reached Western pop on tracks by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

The steelpan, a tuned drum shaped from a 55-gallon oil barrel, comes from which Caribbean island nation?

Trinidad and Tobago made the steelpan its national instrument, and the first band to play only oil-drum instruments was formed there to visit Britain in 1951.

Flamenco, sometimes danced with clicking castanets, grew up in Andalusia, a region in the south of which nation?

Spain is home to Andalusia, where flamenco grew up and where castanets are usually called palillos, meaning little sticks.

Which hand-held instrument has pairs of small metal jingles called zills set into its circular frame?

Tambourine players can shake it, strike it or run a thumb around the rim for a fast roll, and the version used in pop music often has no drum skin at all.

Which electronic instrument is played by moving the hands near its two antennas without ever touching it?

Theremin is also the name of its inventor, Leon Theremin, who patented it in 1928; one hand controls how high the note is while the other controls the volume.

Which rattles, shaken by a handle and usually played as a pair, are heard in much Caribbean and Latin music?

Maracas were traditionally made from gourds or calabash fruits, and they shake out the rhythm in styles such as salsa, mambo and samba.

Which composer wrote the Christmas Eve ballet The Nutcracker, home of the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy?

Tchaikovsky's full ballet was at first less successful than the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite he had premiered nine months earlier, and only grew popular in later years.

Which composer wrote The Four Seasons, a set of four concertos for spring, summer, autumn and winter?

Vivaldi filled the music with sound pictures, including singing birds, a shepherd's barking dog, buzzing flies and storms.

Which composer wrote the famous themes for Star Wars, Jaws and the first three Harry Potter films?

John Williams also scored Superman, E.T. and the first two Home Alone films, and the American Film Institute ranked his Star Wars music the greatest film score.

Which American composer, known as the March King, wrote The Stars and Stripes Forever?

John Philip Sousa also wrote Semper Fidelis, the official march of the US Marine Corps, while The Stars and Stripes Forever is the national march of the United States.

Which lawyer wrote the words of The Star-Spangled Banner after watching the British bombard Fort McHenry?

Francis Scott Key wrote the words as a poem in 1814, but the song did not officially become the national anthem of the United States until 1931.

Which jazz trumpeter and singer, nicknamed both Satchmo and Pops, recorded What a Wonderful World?

Louis Armstrong was born and raised in New Orleans, and his other best-known songs include La Vie en rose and When the Saints Go Marching In.

Which singer, called the King of Rock and Roll, lived in a Memphis mansion named Graceland?

Elvis Presley bought Graceland in 1957, and the stretch of highway that runs past the mansion was later renamed Elvis Presley Boulevard.

Which Motown star, blind since shortly after birth, topped the American chart at age 13 with Fingertips?

Stevie Wonder signed with Motown at 11 under the name Little Stevie Wonder, and Fingertips made him the youngest solo artist ever to top the Hot 100.

In The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns, which creature is portrayed by a famous cello solo?

The swan was the only part Saint-Saëns allowed to be published in his lifetime; he feared the rest of the playful suite would hurt his serious image.

Which singer of Jolene and 9 to 5 founded the Imagination Library, which gives free books to young children?

Dolly Parton launched the program in Sevier County, Tennessee, in 1995, and each child receives a free book every month from birth until age five.

Which British pop star wrote the songs for Disney's The Lion King with lyricist Tim Rice?

Elton John also performs several tracks on the soundtrack himself, while the film's orchestral score was composed by Hans Zimmer.

Which Beatle, the band's drummer, sang lead on the children's favorite Yellow Submarine?

Ringo Starr was handed the tune as his vocal spot on the album after Paul McCartney and John Lennon set out to write a children's song.

Which backward-gliding dance move did Michael Jackson make famous while performing Billie Jean on TV in 1983?

The moonwalk makes a dancer glide backward while the body seems to be walking forward, and the move is also known as the backslide.

Which Swedish pop group won Eurovision with Waterloo and later inspired the musical Mamma Mia!?

ABBA won the contest in 1974, and Waterloo was voted the best song in Eurovision history during its 50th anniversary celebration in 2005.

Which composer wrote Messiah, whose Hallelujah chorus audiences traditionally stand up to hear?

Handel is at the center of a legend: audiences are said to stand because King George II once did, yet there is no convincing evidence the king was ever there.

Which composer, dubbed the King of Ragtime, became famous with the Maple Leaf Rag in 1899?

Scott Joplin wrote more than 40 ragtime pieces, and the Maple Leaf Rag became the style's first big hit and brought him a steady income.

What are the two stacked numbers at the start of a piece of music, such as 4/4 or 3/4, called?

Time signature numbers do two jobs: the top one tells how many beats fit in each measure, and the bottom one tells which kind of note is being counted.

Hip-hop music grew out of 1970s block parties in which borough of New York City?

The Bronx is where DJ Kool Herc found a way to stretch a record's best drum break by switching between two copies of the same record.

What is the name of the system that gives musical notes singing syllables such as do, re and mi?

Solfège takes its name from two of its own syllables, sol and fa, and it helps musicians hear a tune in their heads before singing it aloud.

Which Italian musical term, shown by a dot above or below a note, means to play it short and detached?

Staccato notes are cut short and separated from the next note by a moment of silence, and a wedge marks the even more clipped staccatissimo.