View All Pages

Need Some Help with Class Listening Assignments and Identifying Musical Instruments?

 

A Note about Class Listening Assignments and Identifying Musical Instruments

Throughout the course, and especially in your class listening assignments, you will be asked to identify what certain instruments are doing during a particular musical passage. In the past, some students have had difficulty with this type of listening simply because they are not familiar with how a particular instrument sounds in jazz, the classical orchestra, or other genres of music.

Below I assembled a few sites that will help. You can go to these sites and listen to examples of musical instruments and how they sound. Please keep this page in mind and come back to it anytime you need to refer to examples of musical instruments.

Let me know if these sites were helpful. Thanks.

http://exploringmusicalinstruments.com/the-most-popular-instruments-used-in-jazz-music
This site focuses mostly on jazz instruments used in the big band jazz (vs. the small group format which is more common in jazz) followed by a video of a performance with all the instruments being performed.
The following site will help identify instruments of the classical symphony orchestra based on how they are arranged on the stage.

http://content.bfwpub.com/webroot_pubcontent/Content/BCS_4/Kerman_Listen_7e/instruments_orch/kermantestIE.htm

An award winning and interesting site. When the site comes up, look to the left upper corner and click on "Instruments and Voices." That will bring up pics of all kinds of instruments that you can hear and identify. It's worthwhile exploring this site for other useful tidbits of information and music examples. I did find it to be a bit "buggy."