Home > Instrumentation

1 Musical

Instrumentation is the study and practice of writing music for a musical instrument.

Writing for a specific instrument requires the ability to take into account the special properties of that instrument such as the following:

• the pitch, timbre and dynamic range of the instrument and available tones in these ranges
• application of chords or other multiple tones
• certain kinds of passages can be especially easy or difficult to play
• playing techniques such as constraints of breathing, fingering, etc.
• special effects, such as harmonics, clicks, pizzicato, glissandi and so on
• notation conventions for the instrument.

See orchestration for a description of the difference between instrumentation, orchestration and arrangement.

2 Engineering

Instrumentation is those devices which are used to measure attributes of physical systems. Transducers measure physical attributes such as temperature, flow, and pressure. Oscilloscopes measure electrical characteristics like wavelength, frequencyFrequency is the measurement of the number of times that a repeated event occurs per unit time. To calculate the frequency, one fixes a time interval, counts the number of occurrences of the event within that interval, and then divides this count by the l and signal strengthIn telecommunications, and particularly in radio, signal strength is the measure of how strong a signal is. Typically, this is measured as voltage per square area. Higher power uses such as broadcasting use units of millivolts per square metre mV/m ..

These devices are generally connected in SCADASCADA Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems are used in industrial and civil engineering applications to control distributed systems from a master location. SCADA is a very broad umbrella that describes solutions across a large variety of indus systems or Distributed Control Systems.