Chordophones sing when strings vibrate—by pluck, bow, or strike
String instruments, or chordophones, make sound from vibrating strings that players strum, pluck, strike, or bow. Guitars take fingers or picks; violins take rosined horsehair; harpsichord keys pluck; hurdy-gurdies crank a rosined wheel. Hollow bodies usually amplify the whisper into a room-filling tone.
Hornbostel–Sachs organology labels them chordophones and, per Curt Sachs, reduces the crowd to zithers, lutes, lyres, and harps. Class 31 instruments can lose their resonator and still function—pianos and harpsichords qualify—while class 32 composites such as violins need the box for string tension. Lutes stretch strings along a neck beyond the body, covering guitars, sitars, and the violin family; lyres hang strings from a yoke; harps set strings vertical to the soundboard.
A French Trois Frères cave image from about 13,000 BC may show a musical bow, though Franz Jahnel in 1965 doubted simple bow-to-harp stories. Mesopotamian lyres of Ur exceed three thousand years of age; a British Museum cylinder seal near 3100 BC may depict a stick lute. Indian finds from about 500 BC carry seven to twenty-one strings; Vietnam yielded a two-thousand-year-old deer-antler monostring. Medieval rebecs, gitterns, and gut or silk strings fed Renaissance and Baroque refinements that look familiar beside modern acoustics.
Nineteenth-century mass production standardized orchestral cellos, violas, basses, and six-string guitars. Twentieth-century amplification changed the game: electric violins by the 1920s, then guitar amps that let jazz soloists cut big bands, magnetic pickups, 1960s stacks for stadium rock, and stompbox fuzz, flangers, and phasers. Distorted electric guitar powered blues rock, fusion, and early heavy metal. From bowed pizzicato to tapped frets, the shared secret remains taut string against air.
Source: String instrument
