But they differ in that they use a flexible membrane in place of the cane reed found in those instruments. On a theoretical level, membrane reeds instruments function much like other reed instruments such as clarinets or oboes. I’m still calling them that, since to my knowledge no other term seems to have arisen. I started using the term membrane reeds for these instruments back then because I knew of no pre-existing name for them in English.
An additional information source is this two-part article on membrane instruments which appeared in the late great Experimental Musical Instruments journal in 1991. You’ll find much more of that information in this article. In it you can see and hear a variety of membrane reed instruments, but the video doesn’t go into much detail on how to build the instruments, nor does it address the acoustics. This essay is designed to accompany a video called Membrane Reeds which can be viewed here on Youtube.
