Vadya

Vadya (वाद्य, ), also called or, is one of the three components of  (musical performance arts), and refers to "instrumental music" in the Indian traditions. The other two components of are  (vocal music, song) and  (dance, movement). In the general sense, vadya means an instrument and the characteristic music they produce, sound, or play out.

Indian musicology
The term in the sense of "music, sounded, played, uttered" appears in Vedic literature such as the, and in early post-Vedic era Sanskrit texts such as the , , , and. These texts refer to the musician or instrumental performer as. A stringed instrument is described with proportional lengths in and, and these are compared to poetical meters. The 17th-century text Sangita Darpana defines (musical arts) as "", meaning  comprises  (vocal music),  (instrumental music), and  (dance).

Classification of instruments
Sanskrit literature describes four types of :
 * stringed musical instrument (chordophone)
 * hollow musical instrument (aerophone)
 * solid musical instrument (idiophone)
 * covered musical instrument (membranophone)

Ensembles and orchestras
The chapter 14 of the describes musical ensembles based on a collective performance of  instruments by musicians, and it calls such a band orchestra as a.

Cultural exchange
The term also appears in the Buddhist Sanskrit text, influential in the Chinese and Japanese traditions, which Luis Gomez translates as "instrumental music".

In Hindu-Javanese music tradition, is called. According to Roger Blench, most scholars consider the term valiha (a Madagascar tube zither instrument) to be rooted in the Sanskrit term, reflecting a period of cultural exchange over the Indian Ocean.