Music has always been humanity’s most universal language — but not every instrument plays by the rules. From a glass contraption that reportedly drove players to madness, to a harp powered entirely by ...

Sitar player Ravi Shankar died Tuesday at the age of 92. Brian Q. Silver, a sitar player with over 40 years of experience, talks about playing the unique instrument and how Shankar popularized the ...

Since the first of our ancestors discovered that banging a stick on a hollow log makes a jolly sound, we hominids have been finding new and unusual ways to make music. We haven’t come close to tapping ...

Stringed instruments make noise from the vibrations of tuned strings, using acoustic or electronic means to amplify those vibrations to the point where they’re loud enough to hear. The strings are ...

At the heart of many of the world’s musical instruments is the same, simple component—a string stretched tight between two points. Plucked, bowed, or struck, each of an instrument’s strings creates ...