Wikipedia:WikiProject Percussion/Glossary

Purpose of this page

This page seeks to document some standardised terminology for use in:

• Article titles.
• Category titles.
• Article texts.

It is not intended to be binding, comprehensive or static. Binding decisions are made by consensus on the relevant article and other talk pages; The results can be reported here, and a wikilink to the discussion as a note or reference is helpful. A comprehensive glossary belongs elsewhere, this is a tool for the WikiProject and no more. Static is just not Wikipedia.

This page should summarise the current thinking on any term that's important to the WikiProject and at least a little bit tricky, and no others.

The list

Alphabetical.

Keyboard percussion

modern chromatic xylophone etc, not celesta, subset of mallet percussion, set out like piano, includes horizontal mounting or vertical (eg chimes)

Mallet

no default usage

1. very general term for beater

2. soft stick used for drums etc

3. hard or soft beater used for gongs

4. hard or soft beater used for mallet percussion

Mallet percussion

xylophone etc, chromatic or diatonic, superset of keyboard percussion, subset of melodic percussion

Melodic percussion

Able to produce several notes by being in a set (eg hand bells) or having several notes (eg steel drum) or similar (eg xylophone), subset of tuned percussion

Percussion

1. very general term, not piano, default usage

2. In Hornbostel-Sachs particularly, instruments hit with or against a dissimilar object eg woodblock, clarinet reed, in contrast to concussion where two similar objects collide eg castanet, oboe reed.

Tuned percussion

(Term to be avoided where possible but in common usage, so it needs coverage.)

Any percussion instrument used to represent a pitch.

Superset of melodic percussion, synonym of pitched percussion, includes both instruments tuned in manufacture eg triangle (instrument) and by player eg timpani.