Instrument sounds are endlessly varied yet fall into families sharing generation principles

Evidence

Acoustic instruments generate a large set of different sounds (Fletcher and Rossing, 1998). If electroacoustic and electric instruments are also accounted for, the discriminable set of different instrument sounds is, in practice, infinite. However, most music and speech is composed of a limited set of types and structures of sounds, where certain basic properties hold. For example, woodwind or plucked string instruments form distinguishable families of musical instruments, where the principle of sound generation and the structure of the sound signal are similar within each family. — Ville Pulkki, Matti Karjalainen, Communication Acoustics- An…, 647

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the family-of-instruments concept where shared sound-generation principles group countless individual sounds.