Online Xylophone

Two xylophones, and why they sound different

The chips above the bars switch between two instruments that share a name and very little else. The toy is the one on the nursery floor: eight painted bars, one for each note of a major scale, low on the left and high on the right. The concert xylophone is the one at the back of an orchestra: 3½ octaves, written F3 to C7, forty-four rosewood bars with every sharp in a raised back row.

Play the same note on both and they do not sound alike, and the reason is underneath the bars. A concert xylophone bar has an arch carved into its underside, and the carving is tuning: it pulls the bar’s first overtone up until it sits exactly a twelfth above the note — an octave and a fifth, three times the frequency. That is what makes a xylophone bright and cutting rather than woody. A toy’s bars are cut to length and never carved, so their overtones land wherever a plain bar puts them, which is 2.76 times the note rather than 3 — not a musical interval at all. That mismatch is the “tock” every toy xylophone has, and no care in cutting the length can remove it.

The second difference hangs below. Under each concert bar is a tube, closed at the bottom and cut to the bar’s note, and a closed tube answers its own note and odd multiples of it — one, three, five times. A xylophone’s carved overtone is at three. So the tube reinforces the note and the overtone the carving was cut for, which is the physical reason a xylophone is tuned to a twelfth and not to something else. The toy has nothing under its bars, and would gain nothing from a tube if it did: 2.76 is nowhere near an odd number.

A piano keyboard made of wood

The concert instrument is laid out exactly the way a piano is, turned into bars. The naturals — C D E F G A B — run in the front row, nearest you. The sharps sit in a second row behind them, raised, each one over the gap between the two naturals it lies between. There is no bar between E and F, or between B and C, for the same reason a piano has no black key there: there is no note in that gap.

That is worth learning from the drawing rather than from a tidy single row, because it is what your hands will find on a real one. A player’s mallets stay over the front row and reach up and back for the sharps, and a run of naturals is a straight line along the front edge. The bars also get shorter as they go up — a bar’s pitch rises as its length shrinks — so the low end is long and the high end is short, which is the shape of every xylophone ever built.

Each bar is drawn with the cord that holds it, and the cord is not where it is for looks. A bar free at both ends has two points that stay still while it vibrates, a little under a quarter of its length in from each end, and the cord passes through exactly there so it holds the bar without stopping it. Because each bar is a different length, the cord slopes across the instrument, as it does on a real frame.

It sounds an octave above what it shows

A xylophone is a transposing instrument: its music is written an octave below where it sounds, to keep the part on the stave. So the bars here are labelled with the written notes — the concert instrument runs from F3 to C7, the notes a player reads — and they sound an octave higher, F4 up to C8, which is the same top note as a piano. The toy follows the same rule: its bars are numbered from middle C like every beginner’s songbook, and it sounds an octave above that.

If you ever point a tuner at a real xylophone, this is the thing to know first: the dial will read an octave higher than your part, and both are right. The marimba tuner explains it alongside the marimba, the vibraphone and the glockenspiel, because checking a bar is the same job on all four.

Songs to play

Press Play a song under the instrument and pick one. The toy reaches 14 of the 21 public-domain songs here — the nursery songs and the Christmas songs people most want, Jingle Bells and Ode to Joy among them — and the concert xylophone reaches all 21. What the toy cannot play is a matter of range, not of difficulty: Happy Birthday to You, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Yankee Doodle, Amazing Grace, Canon in D, Mo Li Hua · Jasmine Flower (茉莉花), Silent Night each need a note below its lowest bar or above its highest.

Every song has three ways in. Play plays it for you and lights each bar as it sounds. Practice lights the next bar and waits as long as you like for you to hit it — this is the one for small children, because nothing moves until they are ready. Play along drops a ring onto each bar in time with the music and tells you at the end how close you were; switch on wait for me and it pauses at every note until you find it.

Songs in colours, for small hands

A child learning on a toy xylophone does not read numbers first; they read colours. The toy here is painted in rainbow order — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet — and the top bar is red again, because it is the same note as the bottom bar, an octave up. Most colour songbooks do the same, and it is the easiest way there is to show a child that two notes can be “the same” and still be different. The numbers on the bars match the colours: red is 1, orange is 2, and so on up to the top red, which is 1 with a dot.

Here are four songs the way a colour songbook prints them. Each one is drawn from the same notes the Play button uses, so what you see here is what the instrument plays; the longer dots are the longer notes.

What the sound is made of

Nothing here is a recording. Each note is built as it is struck, from what a xylophone bar physically does: the note itself, the carved overtone at exactly three times its frequency, a fainter one higher up that the carving leaves roughly where it falls, and a short click from the mallet. The overtones die sooner than the note, as they do in wood, and a harder tap brings them out more, which is why a loud xylophone note is brighter and not only louder. The tube under each bar makes the note and the twelfth louder and slightly shorter, which is what a real resonator does — it radiates the energy it borrows.

The toy is built the same way from different facts: its overtones sit at the plain bar’s 2.76 and 5.40 rather than at a tuned 3, it has no tube, and it is struck with a wooden ball. Those numbers are not tuned by ear; they are the solutions of the equation for a bar free at both ends. What is not measured is the balance between them — how loud each overtone is, how fast it fades — because there is no single correct xylophone to measure, and every instrument and every mallet differs. It is a model of the physics, not a copy of one particular instrument.

Because a xylophone’s pitch is carved into the wood, every note here sounds at exactly its pitch every time — the page does not add the small random detuning some of the other instruments on this site use for realism. And because the bars are wood, nothing rings for long: under a second at the bottom of the concert instrument, a fraction of one at the top. Lifting your finger changes nothing, as lifting a mallet changes nothing.

Playing it with a keyboard

The letters on the bars are the keys, running up the instrument from the lowest bar: Q W E R T Y U I are the toy’s eight bars in order, which puts a whole song under one row of the keyboard. On the concert xylophone they run up the bars chromatically, sharps included, and the keyboard reaches the lowest twenty-six — from F3 to F♯5, most of the range the songs use. Turn the letters off in the controls under the instrument once you no longer need them.

More instruments you can play here

The online kalimba is the other struck instrument with a songbook of tabs, and the online handpan is the one where nothing stops ringing — the exact opposite of a xylophone, and a good pair to hear side by side. The online lyre plays the same songs on strings.

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