Instrumentation

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.

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, frequency and signal strength.

These devices are generally connected in SCADA systems or Distributed Control Systems.