What are the eight sounds of Chinese music?

The bayin is an ancient classification of instruments by the material that makes their tone: metal for bells, stone for chimes, silk for strings, bamboo for flutes, gourd for the sheng, clay for the ocarina, leather for drums, and wood for clappers.

Which traditional instruments are covered on this site?

Ten: the guqin, guzheng, pipa, and yangqin among strings; the dizi, xiao, sheng, and suona among winds; the erhu; and drums and gongs. Together they span nearly all of the eight sound categories.

What is yayue in Chinese music?

The elegant music of the Confucian court - solemn, stately music performed at sacrifices and state rites to harmonize the emperor, the people, and heaven itself.

What is the oldest Chinese instrument still played today?

The guqin and the sheng both trace back around three thousand years. The sheng, a phoenix-shaped mouth organ, is among the oldest instruments on earth and was almost certainly the first to play harmony.

Chinese Traditional Music & Instruments

Chinese Traditional Music

Long before the first note was written down, China was listening. To the wind in the bamboo, the water over stone, the cry of the wild goose, the strike of bronze on bronze. From those sounds grew one of the oldest musical civilizations on earth — an art of silk strings and hollow reeds, of court ritual and village festival, of the scholar's solitary zither and the thunder of the dragon dance. These are the instruments that gave a civilization its voice.

Chinese music (yinyue, 音乐) is among the most ancient continuous musical traditions in the world. Its highest ceremonial form was yayue (雅乐), the "elegant music" of the Confucian court — solemn, stately, performed at sacrifices and state rites to harmonize the emperor, the people, and heaven itself. Confucius regarded music as inseparable from moral cultivation: a well-ordered sound reflected a well-ordered soul, and a well-ordered soul reflected a well-ordered state. To make sense of this vast world of sound, the ancients devised a classification as old as the music itself — the bayin (八音), the "eight sounds," which grouped every instrument by the material that produced its tone: metal (金, bells and gongs), stone (石, chimes), silk (丝, the plucked and bowed strings), bamboo (竹, the flutes), gourd (匏, the sheng), clay (土, the ocarina), leather (革, the drums), and wood (木, the percussive clappers). The ten instruments below span almost all of these categories — and together they tell the story of how China learned to sing.