# Name of this instrument?



## alanfarwell

There's this instrument I hear quite frequently throughout a lot of movie and television soundtracks and even some classic music and I've never been able to figure out what it is. It's a bit of an ambient and reverberated kind of sound that almost sounds like a human voice and woodwind played together and then distorted. I'm not even sure if it's a stringed instrument but I didn't know what category to put it in and the closest match I got was an erhu. Notable examples that come to mind are some tracks from the show "Gotham", "The Odyssey", and "Silent Hill":

you can hear it at 0:08, 0:12, and 0:23: 




in this one at 0:25: 




in this one at 1:21: 




and you hear it a lot in this one beginning at 0:12: 




Thanks to anyone who has any information


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## Art Rock

Difficult to hear. My first reaction is the lower range of a cimbalom.

EDIT: skip that - the other excerpts are nothing like that.


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## Larkenfield

If you‘ve heard it in classical music — where? I did not find these examples helpful; there are too many other sounds going on at the same time.


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## dgee

The examples you provide give me no reason to believe it's a live instrument. Near certainty that it's digital


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## alanfarwell

Alright, so after contacting the composer himself, I found out that although, yes, it is digitally made, it's supposed to sound like two actual instruments called the erhu and the dulcimer that have been combined together and distorted slightly


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## Nate Miller

modern pop and film music layers samples to make custom sounds. Its really what everybody does now. 

when you layer samples, you use filters and EQ to get the parts of each waveform you want and then the result is a sound that honestly does not exist out there in the analog world

and that is why this sound was hard to place


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## HelpMeUnderstand

i am not sure what they are, i hope you find out.


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