The guitar and piano seem like the two most widely-used instruments. Is that because of their resonance?
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They are both chordal instruments; they can play multiple notes simultaneously, and can form chords. This makes them much more versatile instruments for use in most types of music.
Guitars are cheap, pianos are pieces of furniture, meaning they are both widely accessible.
They cover a large range of octaves so they can play most songs “to the extent that a bass or cello is restricted to a lower range and a piccolo is restricted to the higher end”.
Neither require a complex technique to get started unlike blown brass and woodwind instruments l, so can just pick it up and go.
Makes sense to me.
What do you mean by resonance?
It doesn’t seem like you actually mean that word by its usual definition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance
I’m not sure what you mean by resonance; every instrument is resonant. However, not every instrument is as versatile as the piano and guitar. Both instruments can easily play harmonies, and the electric versions of both instruments allow access to a variety of different sounds at the turn of a knob. These things make these instruments appealing to a variety of players, particularly those who are just making music by themselves/for fun. Contrast that with something like the bassoon, which has a high learning curve and is best suited to playing written repertoire (most of which requires several other people if not a full orchestra to perform) rather than improvising or coming up with your own music on a whim.
I’m not sure what you mean by “resonance” but there are many instruments that are louder, whose sounds sustains and carries for much longer with richer overtones. I wouldn’t use the word “resonant” to describe either of those instruments especially
The piano is extremely versatile and can play pretty much any other instrument’s part, and with unrestricted polyphony, so it’s it’s the ultimate general-purpose instrument.
The guitar can achieve some of this but is also considerably less expensive and highly portable.
I’d say it’s because they can be used to create music without any other instruments accompanying them. You can sit at a party with a guitar or piano and play songs and sing at the same time. It’s pretty difficult to do that with most other instruments
Before the electric guitar, the banjo was actually much more common in popular music because it has much better natural volume, so you could play it in an acoustic band and be clearly heard. The guitar used to be mostly a classical instrument.
These two instruments are common in large part to cultural history rather than any specific quality of the instrument. Both guitar and piano were invented in Western Europe in countries which spread their culture very widely.
Both Spain and Italy had huge empires, large global trade and enormous cultural influence. That made these instruments commonly used in important pieces of music, so they became more commonly played.
If India had been the dominant cultural exporter in the last 1000 years, we would probably all know how to play sitar and sarod.
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The piano (and keyboard instruments in general) were always popular because of it’s versatility to play any genre of music. The piano was particularly suitable in romantic and classical periods of music since it had a wide range of dynamics. And because of it’s popularity in history, playing technique was adapted as genre and musical tastes change. It’s was also everywhere, if you were a venue, you had a piano.
Versions of the guitar were popular for a longer period of time, but it was either used for folk music, or played chords or rhythm in an ensemble. It was too quiet to be the main event. There was one major tech development that allowed the guitar to become popular: electric amplification. Players could be heard in an ensemble, which limited their ability to get loud. Rock and roll, and rhythm and blues started becoming popular genres of music, but they required loud guitars. The technology just wasn’t there to do that cleanly so they would crank their amps to become distorted, this created a very exciting performance and people seemed to love that sound. As guitar became more popular, people started adopting it to other genres that are popular, and so guitar is used in a lot of different music and is become one of the most popular instruments to play.
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