The xylophone (from Ancient Greek ξύλον (xúlon) ´wood´, and φωνή (phōnḗ) ´sound, voice´; lit. ´sound of wood') is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden ...
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bars struck by mallets. Like the glockenspiel (which uses metal bars), the xylophone essentially consists of a set of tuned wooden keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children´s instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use.