The examples below give a few different notes of a few different orchestral instruments. The examples are excerpted from The McGill University Master Samples collection, a fabulous set of CDs of instruments playing every note in their range, recorded in studio conditions. The examples below have been downsampled to 11 kHz mono, but the original data is much higher quality.
Each row in the following table consists of a single pitch, described both by its musical name (chroma+octave) and its nominal frequency (on the A440 tuning scale). The the different columns give that note played by some different instruments, where available. Some instruments cannot play some notes, so those cells are blank.
| Note (freq) | piano | trumpet | flute | violin |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| G3 (196 Hz) | piano-G3 | trumpet-G3 | ||
| C4 (261 Hz) | piano-C4 | trumpet-C4 | violin-C4 | flute-C4 |
| G4 (392 Hz) | piano-G4 | trumpet-G4 | violin-G4 | flute-G4 |
| C5 (523 Hz) | piano-C5 | trumpet-C5 | violin-C5 | flute-C5 |
| G5 (784 Hz) | piano-G5 | trumpet-G5 | violin-G5 | flute-G5 |
| C6 (1046 Hz) | piano-C6 | trumpet-C6 | violin-C6 | flute-C6 |
| G6 (1568 Hz) | piano-G6 | violin-G6 | flute-G6 |
For more instrument samples, check out the University of Iowa Musical Instrument Samples (MIS).