Single-reed instrument

The single-reed instrument is a member of the single-reed instruments (Hornbostel–Sachs 422.2). Learn how it makes its sound and explore related instruments.

How the single-reed instrument makes its sound

In the Hornbostel–Sachs system, which classifies instruments by how they produce sound, the single-reed instrument belongs to the single-reed instruments: a single reed beats against a mouthpiece – clarinets and saxophones.

More broadly it is one of the aerophones (wind instruments), where sound comes from vibrating air.

Press play above and watch the spectrum: the evenly spaced peaks are harmonics, and their relative strength is what gives the instrument its character.

From Wikipedia

A single-reed instrument is a woodwind instrument that uses only one reed to produce sound. The very earliest single-reed instruments were documented in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece as well as the Middle East, and the Roman Empire. The earliest types of single-reed instruments used idioglottal reeds, where the vibrating reed is a tongue cut and shaped on the tube of cane. Much later, single-reed instruments started using heteroglottal reeds, where a reed is cut and separated from the tube of cane and attached to a mouthpiece of some sort. By contrast, in a double reed instrument (such as the oboe and bassoon), there is no mouthpiece; the two parts of the reed vibrate against one another. Reeds are traditionally made of cane and produce sound when air is blown across or through them. The type of instruments that use a single reed are clarinets and saxophone. The timbre of a single and double reed instrument is related to the harmonic series caused by the shape of the corpus. E.g. the clarinet is only including the odd harmonics due to air column modes canceling out the even harmonics. This may be compared to the timbre of a square wave.