A
horn is any of a family of
musical instruments made of a tube, usually made of metal and often curved in various ways, with one narrow end into which the musician blows, and a wide end from which sound emerges. In horns, unlike other
brass instruments such as the
trumpet, the bore gradually increases in width through most of its length—that is to say, it is
conical rather than
cylindrical. In jazz and popular-music contexts, the word may be used loosely to refer to any
wind instrument, and a section of
brass or
woodwind instruments, or a mixture of the two, is called a horn section in these contexts.