What is a xylophone cousin?

Answer 1

The xylophone is an instrument made up of wooden bars which are struck with mallets. The bars are tuned and laid out like a slice through a piano keyboard, with the 'white key' notes (the diatonic C major scale) closer to the player and the bars for the 'black keys' set further away so that they are positioned on the spaces between the 'white keys'. The two intervals which don't have black keys on the piano (between e and f and between b and c) also don't have bars between them on the xylophone. Under the bars, there is often a set of vertical tubes, open at both ends, called resonators, which are meant to reinforce the sound. The sound of the xylophone is dominated by three non-harmonic components tuned a fifth apart (the first three harmonics being a fifth apart and a fourth apart, forming an octave between the first and third.) This gives the instrument its characteristic sound. The bars, being small, sound for a short period (lengthened slightly by the resonators.)

The organologists class the xylophone as an 'ideophone', something which makes its musical tones by vibrating itself, as opposed to vibration of a string which drives the body or a vibrating air column. In this sense, any struck music instrument is loosely a cousin of the xylophone (like the triangle), except that the xylophone is, unlike most percussion, an instrument with multiple specific pitches.

The xylophone's ancestor in western music is the straw-fiddle, believed brought to Europe by African slaves. It is thought to have originated in both Asia and Africa, independently, and may be one of the first instruments invented by man. In 1511, it is mentioned by Schlick and also appears in "Musica Geteucht", an early visual catalog of Musical Instruments in Germany. It appears again in 1621 in Praetorius' Syntagma Musicum's Theatrum Instrumentorum.

The modern instrument's range is a variable, with different xylophones exhibiting ranges from 2-1/2 octaves to 4 octaves.

Cousins of the Xylophone in western music include:

Marimba: with larger bars, generally carved to increase their size without reducing their pitch, longer resonators, the Marimba has a more mellow sound, which begins with a higher-pitched, but short-lived transient sound.

Vibraphone: uses large metal bars, long resonators, and has an addition of rotating disks in the resonators. The disks are ganged on a shaft and driven by a motor, but otherwise, the vibraphone is not electronic (i.e., no amplification). It is very mellow, with vibrato in its tone from the rotating disks in the resonators. An addition sometimes found in the Marimba but never in the xylophone is a foot-pedal which operates felt dampers, so whole chords can be sounded (the player employing two mallets per hand) and stopped simultaneously. In Jazz Music, the vibraphone has long supplanted the xylophone. The pitches and range generally are similar to the Marimba.

Orchestra bells: Made with silver or silver-alloy bars, generally tuned in the xylophone range, and struck with beaters made of small brass balls on the end of very thin bamboo, nylon or fiberglass sticks. Their sound is that of bells, but with great carrying power. The metal bars lie on felt dampers to limit their resonance and sounding time somewhat.

Celeste: this is a mechanized version of the orchestra bells, with a keyboard and hammer mechanism (one hammer for each bar). The bars are enclosed in a large case which allows some mechanical modification and control over the sound, allowing it to sound more sweet than the orchestra bells, and the keyboard arrangement allows more convenient chording and arpeggiating than mallet-struck instruments.

Orchestra Chimes: although it may seem that there is little connection between the xylophone and chimes, they have a lot of similarities: the tubular chimes resonate with the same "klang" (stacked fourth components rather than harmonic components) as the xylophone bars, although many more. They are struck with leather-headed hammers and have a damper-pedal similar to the vibraphone.

From this shopping list of relations to the xylophone, it can be seen that almost any instrument which consists of individual tone-producers arranged in a logical order could be classified as a cousin to the xylophone. This includes the piano, which is a step further away from the xylophone than the celeste, but it also includes a plethora of Asian instruments, the Indonesian gamelan pelog and slendro gambang are examples and African instruments, the Mosambique Mbila and west African Balafon being examples.

There are also other distant cousins: the stringed Hammered Dulcimer being an example: sets of strings tuned to pitches are struck with hammers held by the player, and are laid out in a logical arrangement. The hammered dulcimer is not an idiophone, though, because the strings are amplified by the body of the instrument.

On the other hand, the youngest instrument which is related to the xylophone may well be the 'thongophone', made famous by the Blue Man Group: here, a set of PVC pipes tuned by length are played by slapping a flexible paddle (the thong) over the end of the pipe. A cross between organ pipes and idiophones, the thongophone relies on the vibration of both the tube and the air column within it.