Play a xylophone online

You can see why each note is what it is

Nearly every instrument hides its pitch mechanism. A piano's strings are inside a box; a saxophone's column of air is invisible. A xylophone hides nothing: the shorter the bar, the higher the note, and the bars are laid out in order so the whole scale is visible at a glance.

A shorter bar is stiffer relative to its weight, so it springs back faster when struck, so it vibrates more times a second - and more vibrations a second is exactly what a higher pitch is. Note that the bars are not halved for each octave, only shortened by about a third: the relationship is not linear, which is why a xylophone's silhouette curves rather than slopes.

The two dots on every bar

Each bar hangs on a cord threaded through two points, and those points are not decorative or convenient - they are the nodes, the two places along a vibrating bar that stay still while the rest of it moves. Support a bar at its nodes and it rings; clamp it anywhere else and you kill the note dead.

That is also why you should never hold a bar to stop it. A xylophone has no damper and no way to sustain: the note is struck, it rings briefly, and it stops on its own. Everything a player controls happens in the strike.

Xylophone, marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone

Four instruments that look alike from a distance and sound nothing alike:

• Xylophone - wooden bars, hard mallets, resonators tuned to an odd harmonic that gives it that bright, dry, woody crack. Short ring. It cuts through an orchestra.
• Marimba - also wooden, but with the bars thinned into a deeper arch and tuned to a different harmonic. Warmer, rounder, much longer sustain, and it goes far lower.
• Glockenspiel - metal bars, tiny, played with hard mallets. Bell-like and piercing; the sound of a music box.
• Vibraphone - metal bars with motor-driven discs spinning inside the resonators, which is where the wobble in its name comes from. It also has a pedal and can sustain, which none of the others can.

It sounds an octave above what it reads

A quirk worth knowing if you ever pick up sheet music for one: the xylophone is a transposing instrument. Its part is written an octave below where it actually sounds, so a player reading C5 produces a pitch that a piano would call C6. The convention exists to keep the part inside the staff instead of floating above it in a cloud of ledger lines.

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Sound: Versilian Studios Chamber Orchestra 2 Community Edition (CC0), rendered through ToneWright's own audio engine.