For example: Which (apparently keyboard) instrument is this?
In the help it mentions that instrument identification questions are off-topic. I can't think of a good reason for this - other off-topic specifications are usually something to do with the question being likely to go out-of-date quickly.
ID questions can be useless if they're vague, but can be pretty interesting if they're well specified. Some other sites allow ID questions, but have strong requirements (e.g. EarthScience.SE).
I'm of the opinion that the specific one talked about here should be on topic, but questions asking whether something is a 1952 or 1954 Les Paul guitar shouldn't be.
So there's obviously a line there, and to be honest I don't know where it is. This probably is a community that has enough folks with wide ranging experience that we could identify weird, historic, unique/rare instruments, so if we can come up with wording that allows the music history end of these questions, but disallows the common ones that a quick check on the artist's website could answer then I'd be happy.
tl;dr - I'd support reopening this one, but lets work out boundaries
I think they should be on topic. I understand that chord identification in a music and other questions alike are not. The scores are usually available and this often serves the curiosity of beginners that wish to play some song.
Instrument identification is interesting and has broader reach. If one likes music and plays it's normal that he/she likes instruments and everything around their evolution. In this sense it might be interesting to musicians in the community. This is basically a musicology / etno musicology question. The same might be valid to identifying an odd instrument sound in an audio track.
Generally, the questions that the community wants here are questions that are likely to be helpful to future users and to random people on the internet. Like, if I have some X question about music theory and I Google it, this site will pop up and the random user will visit it etc.
It is not really common for a random user to Google 'What type of keyboard is this?', so that is why this type of questions get closed.
Although, I have to say that I'm not 100% with that rule. Google supports Image Search for quite a while now, so someone might actually Image Search that image and this site will pop up. Ι believe we should allow some questions, like the aforementioned one, which seem nice (I voted to reopen)
