electrophones

A number of computational musical instruments that are not electrophones have been invented, designed, built, and used in performances.

Sachs later added a fifth category, electrophones, such as theremins, which produce sound by electronic means.

The vast majority of electrophones produced in the first half of the twentieth century were what Sachs called "electromechanical instruments".

Some quintephones work entirely without using electricity in any way, and are thus certainly not electrophones, yet they generate sound computationally rather than acoustically.

Electrophones (5)

A rare inclusion in a marching band that is becoming more popular is the use of Electrophones in a marching band.

The proliferation of electricity in the twentieth century lead to the creation of an entirely new category of musical instruments: electronic instruments, or electrophones.

But, nevertheless, those historical circumstances cannot belittle the fact that the Denis d'or can justifiably be regarded as the forefather of all electrophones, at least from the idealistic point of view.

For Mann, electronic instruments, i.e. electrophones, are a proper subset of quintephones, but the category quintephone is necessary to describe computational sound synthesizers that operate by other-than-electrical means, such as synthesizers that work using optical computing.

Instruments belonging to the fifth Hornbostel-Sachs category, "electrophones", added by Sachs in the 1940s (Kartomi, book reference) are quintephones, but a number of other instruments have been invented that synthesize sound, or record and play back sound samples, optically, mechanically, or otherwise.

Present-day ethnomusicologists, such as Margaret Kartomi (page 173), and Ellingson (PhD dissertation, 1979, p. 544) suggest that, in keeping with the spirit of the original Hornbostel Sachs classification scheme, of categorization by what first produces the initial sound in the instrument, that only subcategory 53 should remain in the electrophones category.