Zen Xylophone
Xylophone, free in your browser
Play a xylophone online with a mouse, touch or your computer keyboard. The bars play one recorded Xylophone sound, and several can ring at once. Your first press turns the sound on, and the bars play as soon as it's ready.
How to play
Click, tap or use a pen on any bar, or play from your computer keyboard. On a touchscreen, several fingers strike several bars together.
With a mouse, the bars show their computer-key labels. Typing in a field, or holding Ctrl, Alt or Meta, plays nothing.
Choose Song, then press Play, and Canon And Gigue In D Major, P.37 plays on the xylophone by itself. Classic VP plays a Virtual Piano letter sheet of it, and Melody plays its tune.
Its sheet in the Zen Library is in the public domain.
A struck bar rings briefly and dies away on its own, whether you tap it or hold it. The highest bars ring for less than a second.
Only the bars on screen play, one to three octaves depending on the screen.
The xylophone
How xylophones are built and where they come from, with sources.
Bars
A modern Western xylophone has bars of rosewood, padauk or cocobolo, or of synthetic materials such as fiberglass; bars of fiberglass-reinforced plastic allow a louder sound. Its music is written an octave below the notes it sounds.
Name
The word comes from Ancient Greek xylon, “wood”, and phōnē, “sound” or “voice”. Taken literally, a xylophone is the sound of wood.
Origins
Where the xylophone began is debated. One view has it starting in Southeast Asia and reaching Africa around AD 500. Roger Blench argues that Africa invented its own, pointing to the greater variety of xylophones found there.
Orchestra
Camille Saint-Saëns wrote a xylophone into his orchestral piece Danse macabre in 1874. By then, Michael Josef Gusikov had already made the instrument popular to some extent, on a five-row xylophone of 28 wooden bars.
This page plays one recorded Xylophone sound on its bars. It offers no choice of mallets, no dampening and no roll.
Before you play
About playing here, and what the full app adds.
No. This virtual xylophone runs online in your browser, with nothing to install and no account.
Your first press turns the sound on. While it loads, the bars say so, and a quick first press plays once the sound is ready. If it can't load, a Try again button appears.
Yes. Press several computer keys together, or touch several bars at once on a touchscreen. A mouse plays one bar at a time.
Each bar plays one recording of a struck bar, which fades on its own, so holding a bar doesn't make it last longer. See “Wooden bars” above for how real xylophones are built.
Its sheet in the Zen Library is in the public domain. Song plays it on the Xylophone sound, as a Virtual Piano letter sheet or as its tune. The song moves by whole octaves to suit the sound, so Classic VP plays an octave higher without its lowest notes.
Yes. On a phone, the bars fit the screen and several fingers strike several bars together. Sound and Settings are in the toolbar, or in the header when the phone is sideways.
A library of songs. Play, on a computer with a mouse or trackpad, has 16 instruments and ways to learn a song, such as Magic Play and Practice; there, this page's link opens the song. On a touch device without a mouse, the link opens the touch piano on Xylophone.