Found instruments reveal how everyday objects become music and reshape sound.

What counts as a musical instrument? A quick thought might make you picture a violin, a drum kit, or a piano. Then you hear a strange clatter from the kitchen and realize sound can be louder than the name on the case. A found instrument is the kind of thing that stretches your idea of what music can be. It’s not something designed to be a musical tool from the start. Instead, it’s an object not intended for music that’s repurposed to create sound.

Found instrument, found sound—these phrases show up a lot in discussions about modern and contemporary music. Here’s the thing: the point isn’t to turn every object into a perfectly tuned thing. The charm lies in the collision between function and sound, between expectation and surprise. Let me explain with a few examples and a bit of context.

What exactly is a found instrument?

• It’s an object not designed for making music.

• It’s used in ways that produce audible sound, sometimes rhythms, sometimes textures, sometimes a blend of both.

• The sound emerges from the material, the way it’s struck, scratched, rubbed, or vibrated, not from an instrument’s intended pitch or timbre.

A piano can be modified to create unusual sounds, sure. That’s a different path—one that involves a design decision to alter a traditional instrument. But a found instrument starts with the premise that ordinary things can become musical tools simply by how we engage with them. A can, a bottle, a metal chair leg, a wooden crate—each becomes an expressive voice once a player discovers its sonic possibilities.

A quick tour of everyday objects that become instruments

• Cans that ring and rattle: Tap them with a stick, tilt them to hear different resonances, even beat a rhythm by moving them across a table edge. The result is percussion with a metallic bite.

• Bottles with water levels that shift pitch: A single bottle can yield a surprising spectrum of tones as you half-fill, empty, or tilt it, letting air and liquid contribute to the soundscape.

• Glass, wood, and metal scraps: Striking a pane of glass, rubbing a wooden block along a metal railing, or tapping a metal pipe can create timbres you’d never expect from “ordinary” objects.

• Household furniture and tools: A chair, a bucket, a broom—these aren’t stage-ready, but they can become percussive agents in the right hands. The chair can stand in for a drum, the bucket for a resonant drumhead, the broom handle as a snare stick.

Found sounds through history: a quick arc

The idea isn’t new, even if the vocabulary feels modern. In the early 20th century, composers and artists began to think about sound as a material in its own right. The avant-garde movements encouraged listening beyond conventional instruments. Music could be assembled from whatever produced sound, not just from a tuning fork and a violin bow.

Musique concrète, developed in the 1940s and 1950s, is a touchstone in this history. Instead of trying to imitate or reproduce sounds with traditional instruments, musicians recorded sounds from the real world—the noises of trains, voices, winds, machines—and then manipulated those recordings as musical material. It’s a clear throughline to the broader idea of found instruments: the sound source matters, and the boundary between “music” and “everyday noise” becomes negotiable.

John Cage, a central figure in modern music discourse, also nudged listeners toward expanding what counts as music. While his most famous works involve chance procedures and silence, his sensibility—that sound itself can be an instrument’s partner or even its sole material—helped dissolve rigid expectations. He might not have called a chair a “found instrument” in every case, but his spirit of curiosity about everyday sound opened the door for many artists to experiment with nontraditional sonic materials.

Why found instruments matter in music history

• They broaden the vocabulary of timbre: When you expect a snare drum but hear a rusted hinge or a glass bottle, your ear tunes in differently. The texture becomes a new color on the sonic palette.

• They challenge traditional hierarchies: If a bucket can carry a rhythm as convincingly as a drum, the value of “serious” instruments gets reexamined. That doesn’t devalue skill or craft; it reframes what counts as musical literacy.

• They highlight context and strategy: Found instruments aren’t just about the object; they’re about how a performer shapes sound within a performance space. The same object can sing in one setting and feel incidental in another.

• They connect music to everyday life: The line between concert hall and street, studio and kitchen, grows blurrier. That crossover invites fresh cultural conversations about art, sound, and community.

What makes a found instrument compelling for music historians

• Creativity and constraint: Artists often start with a limitation—no traditional instrument available, or a concept that requires sound to emerge from non-music objects. The constraint becomes a catalyst for invention.

• Social and cultural resonance: Found instruments can reflect material culture—the objects people use daily, the environments they inhabit, and the sounds those environments produce. In this way, they’re artifacts as much as instruments.

• Pedagogical value: For students of music history, found instruments offer case studies in how sound cultures shift. They illustrate how listening practices change when the source of sound isn’t predetermined to be musical.

• Ethical and philosophical threads: The idea that “sound can be anything” raises questions about authorship, authorship rights of ordinary objects, and the relationship between an artist and their material world.

Digressions that still circle back

You know how a street musician can make a crowd stop with a single improvised rhythm on a metal bucket? There’s something communal about that moment. A found instrument often turns an ordinary scene—an alley, a market, a park—into a temporary concert hall. The sound isn’t polished like a studio recording; it carries the grit of everyday life. And that grit matters. It invites listeners to listen more closely, to notice textures that would normally slip past us.

Or consider how educators and artists use found instruments in introductory music-history discussions. It’s a friendly gateway to discuss sound studies without drowning students in jargon. You can say, “Sound is a material thing; it travels through air, interacts with surfaces, and changes depending on how we manipulate the object.” Simple, relatable, and a little provocative. It makes people question: what else could become music if we approached it with curiosity rather than reverence for a traditional instrument?

How to talk about found instruments in a scholarly, yet accessible way

• Define clearly, then illustrate: Start with the core idea—an object not intended for music used to create sound—and support with specific examples, as above.

• Show context without overloading: Mention movements like musique concrète and Cagean ideas, but keep the focus on the object’s role in sound production.

• Use concrete language: Talk about materials, textures, resonances. People remember when a sound is tied to a tangible image.

• Balance precision and storytelling: You want to be accurate, but it helps when the narrative feels alive—like you’re guiding a reader through a listening session.

Practical takeaways for readers

• Listen actively: When you hear an unconventional sound in a piece, try to trace it back to its source. Was it a sound from a found instrument, or a processed recording that mimicked one?

• Think in timbral families: Percussive, resonant, brittle, lush—these are helpful categories for analyzing found-sound textures. It’s less about pitch accuracy and more about color and mood.

• Consider performance choices: In live settings, the way a performer interacts with a found object—how hard they strike, where they place it, how they Mmm and Ah as they listen—adds a narrative layer to the soundscape.

• Tie to cultural moments: Found instruments often appear during periods of rapid change or experimentation. They’re not just sonic whimsy; they reflect broader conversations about technology, urban life, and artistic authority.

A few iconic touchstones worth revisiting

• Everyday objects in performance: Contemporary artists sometimes stage pieces around ordinary items—brooms sweeping in rhythmic patterns, glass bottles tapped to produce glistening tones, metal pipes used as metallic bells. These acts foreground sound as event, rather than background filler.

• The studio as instrument: In the studio, the room itself can become part of the instrument. The way walls reflect sound, the resonant properties of furniture, and the room’s acoustic quirks all contribute to the final listening experience.

• The ethics and aesthetics of found sounds: Some listeners crave the pristine, others savor the imperfect. Found instruments remind us that music is as much about listening as it is about creating. The imperfect charm can be a feature, not a flaw.

Tying it back to the bigger picture

Found instruments embody a core truth about music history: sound is alive, dynamic, and oftentimes playful. They remind us that music isn’t locked into a fixed toolkit. The exciting part is watching how artists, listeners, and cultures negotiate what counts as music at any given moment. When a student of music history reads about a rusted hinge or a water-filled bottle, they’re not just cataloging a quirky moment. They’re tracking a shift in how people perceive sound, how communities produce meaning through listening, and how art continuously redefines its own boundaries.

If you’re exploring the topic further, it’s worthwhile to compare different historical threads. How did early 20th-century experiments with found sounds differ from later ambient or noise movements? How have contemporary artists integrated found-materials with digital synthesis, live electronics, or field recordings? Each angle adds a layer to the story of how human creativity turns ordinary objects into extraordinary voices.

In the end, a found instrument is less about the object itself and more about the curiosity that surrounds it. It’s a reminder that music history isn’t a straight line from grand concert halls to grander concert halls. It’s a tapestry of sounds, places, and people who kept listening—tapping on a can, striking a bottle, letting a chair leg echo—until something new, something resonant, took shape. And that is as compelling as it gets for anyone who loves music with a sense of possibility.