Folk and Ethnic Musical Instruments

Players of Bowed String Instruments produce their sound by moving a bow across the strings. The practice of bowing is commonly thought to have originated in Central Asia from where it spread rapidly along trade routes and by 1000 had reached China, Indonesia, Northern Africa and Europe. The term fiddle is often used as a generic term for bowed musical instruments that feature a neck. Musicologists distinguish between long neck fiddles and short neck fiddles.

Typical short neck fiddles are the European violin family, the gadulka from Bulgaria, the Arabian rebab, the sarangi and the sarinda from India and the the kobuz from Central Asia. Short neck fiddles can be extremely simple, consisting merely in a hollow or carved piece of wood.

The family of long neck fiddles includes the erh-hu from China, the khil-kuur from Mongolia, the git-git from the Philippines, the sa dueng from Burma (Myanmar), the kamangah and the katmantche from the Middle East, the gusla and  the amz'ad of the Saharan Tuareg and the riti from West Africa.

In the Swedish nyckelharpa from and the drehleier/hurdy-gurdy from medieval Europe the strings are bowed with the help of a wheel moved by the player turning a crank at the side of the instrument. In the singing saw, a metal blade instead of a string is brought to vibrate by the bow (which is why the singing saw is sometimes classified as a friction idiophone).