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This musical instrument quiz has 49 free questions with answers and covers the whole orchestra and a good deal beyond it. You will meet the harpsichord maker who invented the piano, the Belgian who gave his name to the saxophone, the Russian physicist whose instrument is played without being touched, and the termites that hollow out didgeridoos. There are questions on how instruments are built, where they came from, who made them famous and the odd records they hold, from a 33,000-pipe organ in Atlantic City to a violin that sold for $15.9 million. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a school music class or family game night: how many keys on a piano, which family the flute belongs to, what a bagpipe's bag was traditionally made from. The rest climb through jazz, folk and world instruments to details only a working musician or a serious trivia player will know. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, and the citation sits under each explanation, so you can settle the argument about whether a saxophone is a woodwind once and for all.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01How many keys does a standard modern piano have?
88
A standard modern piano has 88 keys, 52 white and 36 black, running from A0 at the bottom up to C8.
Q 02Bartolomeo Cristofori invented the piano around 1700 while employed by the Medici as what?
Keeper of the Instruments
Cristofori was Keeper of the Instruments for Prince Ferdinando de' Medici in Florence; his hammers struck the strings and fell back, letting the player control volume as a harpsichord could not.
Q 03Which piano maker's Imperial model has 97 keys instead of the usual number?
Bösendorfer
Bösendorfer's Imperial grand, model 290, has 97 keys; the nine extra bass keys are often coloured black so the pianist keeps their bearings.
Q 04The saxophone is made of brass, yet it belongs to which family of instruments?
Woodwind
The single-reed mouthpiece is what counts, not the metal. Belgian maker Adolphe Sax patented it on 28 June 1846, hoping to combine brass projection with woodwind agility.
Q 05The saxophone was patented in 1846 by an instrument maker from which country?
Belgium
Adolphe Sax was born in Dinant, Belgium, in 1814 and settled in France, where he patented the saxophone in 1846 and spent years in lawsuits over it.
Q 06The four strings of a violin are tuned in which interval?
Perfect fifths
The violin's four strings are tuned in perfect fifths: G3, D4, A4 and E5 from lowest to highest, each a fifth above the last.
Q 07The 1721 'Lady Blunt' Stradivarius violin sold at auction in 2011 for roughly how much?
$15.9 million
The Lady Blunt fetched $15.9 million (£9.8 million) at Tarisio in June 2011, sold by the Nippon Music Foundation to fund Japanese earthquake relief, then an auction record for a violin.
Q 08Roughly how many of Antonio Stradivari's instruments are known to survive?
About 650
About 650 of Stradivari's instruments survive, most of them violins, out of roughly 1,100 he made in his Cremona workshop; tree-ring dating traces their spruce tops to Alpine forests.
Q 09The theremin, invented in 1920, is unusual because it is played how?
Without touching it
It is played without touching it: two antennas sense the distance of the player's hands, one controlling pitch and the other volume.
Q 10What instrument actually plays the touchless-sounding electronic part on the Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations'?
An Electro-Theremin
The part was played on an Electro-Theremin, a slide-controlled instrument built by trombonist Paul Tanner that is far easier to play in tune than a true theremin.
Q 11Traditional didgeridoos are made from eucalyptus branches that have been hollowed out by what?
Termites
Termites hollow out the trunk by eating the dead heartwood and leaving the living sapwood; makers tap trunks to find ones already eaten through.
Q 12The Hawaiian word 'ukulele' roughly translates as what?
Jumping flea
'Ukulele is usually glossed as 'jumping flea', from 'uku (flea) and lele (to jump), said to describe the player's quick, darting fingers.
Q 13The ukulele descends from small guitar-like instruments brought to Hawaii by immigrants from where?
Portugal
Immigrants from Madeira, Portugal, landing on the Ravenscrag in 1879, brought the machete and rajão; Hawaiian makers turned them into the ukulele within a decade.
Q 21The world's largest pipe organ, with 33,112 pipes, stands in a boardwalk hall in which New Jersey resort?
Atlantic City
The Midmer-Losh organ in Atlantic City's Boardwalk Hall was built between 1929 and 1932; its Grand Ophicleide stop reaches about 130 decibels, and a 1944 hurricane began decades of damage.
Q 22In Ctesibius's 3rd-century BC hydraulis, the first organ, what kept the air pressure steady?
Water pressure
Water pressure: hand pumps forced air into a chamber partly submerged in water, and the water's weight kept the wind pressure even, hence the name hydraulis, 'water pipe'.
Q 23In Hornbostel-Sachs classification, an instrument whose own body vibrates, like a triangle, is called what?
Idiophone
Q 14Which Roman emperor was described by Suetonius as a player of the tibia utricularis, an early bagpipe?
Nero
Suetonius wrote that Nero vowed to perform publicly as a utricularius, a bagpiper, near the end of his reign; Dio Chrysostom also mentions him playing a pipe with a bag under his arm.
Q 15Which instrument gives the orchestra its tuning note, a concert A?
Oboe
The oboe sounds the tuning A because its pitch is hard to adjust, so everyone else tunes to it, and its penetrating tone carries to every desk.
Q 16The oldest known musical instruments, found in caves in Germany, are flutes made from what?
Vulture bone and mammoth ivory
The Swabian Jura flutes are carved from griffon vulture wing bone and mammoth ivory; the Hohle Fels vulture-bone flute has five finger holes and dates to around 40,000 years ago.
Q 17The Fender Stratocaster, introduced in 1954, traditionally carries how many pickups?
Three
The three single-coils and five-way switch, plus the contoured body, made it the template every rival copies. Hendrix, Clapton and Buddy Holly all played one.
Q 18The modern classical guitar's shape was settled around 1850 by makers from which country?
Spain
Antonio de Torres Jurado, working in Seville and later Almería in Spain, fixed the larger body and fan-braced top that every classical guitar since has copied.
Q 19What tune did the Gemini 6 astronauts play on harmonica and chimes in December 1965, the first instruments in space?
Jingle Bells
Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford played 'Jingle Bells' on a tiny harmonica and a string of small bells after deadpan-reporting a 'satellite' piloted by a man in a red suit; both are at the Smithsonian.
Q 20The dominant harmonica maker was founded in Trossingen in 1857 by a man in what trade?
Clockmaker
Matthias Hohner, a clockmaker by trade, began making harmonicas in Trossingen in 1857, and within decades his firm was the world's largest harmonica maker.
An idiophone's whole body vibrates to make the sound, as a triangle, xylophone or cymbal does; membranophones are drums, chordophones strings, aerophones winds.
Q 24The Hornbostel-Sachs system of classifying instruments was first published in which year?
1914
Erich von Hornbostel and Curt Sachs published their scheme in 1914 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, modelling its numbered categories on the Dewey Decimal library system.
Q 25George Harrison played the sitar on which Beatles song, recorded in 1965?
Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)
Harrison played a sitar bought from a London shop on 'Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)', recorded in October 1965 for Rubber Soul; he began lessons with Ravi Shankar the next year.
Q 26Roughly how many strings, including sympathetic ones, can a sitar have in total?
Eighteen to twenty-one
A sitar carries eighteen to twenty-one strings: about six played strings over the frets and eleven to thirteen sympathetic strings beneath them that ring along.
Q 27How does a trumpet player actually produce the sound?
Vibrating the lips in the mouthpiece
The buzz sets up a standing wave in the tubing. A standard B-flat trumpet has about 1.48 metres of it, and three valves add extra lengths to lower the pitch.
Q 28Since 1971 the players' international society has recommended calling the 'French horn' simply what?
The horn
The International Horn Society voted in 1971 that the instrument be called simply the horn, since its modern design is German rather than French; players shade pitch with a hand in the bell.
Q 29The Italian word 'violoncello', shortened to cello, literally means what?
Little violone
Violoncello is 'little violone', the -cello suffix being a diminutive of violone, the big bass viol; the cello is tuned C, G, D, A, an octave below the viola.
Q 30The double bass differs from the rest of the orchestral string family in being tuned in which interval?
Fourths
The double bass is tuned in fourths, E1, A1, D2, G2, matching a bass guitar and the lowest four strings of an ordinary guitar.