The flexatone or fleximetal is a modern percussion instrument (an indirectly struck idiophone) consisting of a small flexible metal sheet suspended in a wire frame ending in a handle.

[4] [The] flexatone [is a] percussion instrument; shaking it causes two wooden balls, one on either side, to strike a metal blade subject to thumb pressure, which thereby can produce spooky glissando effects.

It was introduced as a new instrument, making 'jazz jazzier' and announced as combining the tone effect of musical saw, orchestra bells, and song whistle.

A tremolo is the normal effect, and thumb pressure on the free end of the plate alone changes the pitch, resulting in a glissando from note to note...It is usually employed as an abstract effect, since it is notoriously difficult to play specified pitches with any accuracy—the thumb pressure to sharpen or flatten is extremely subtle and difficult to gauge...The sound is quite clangy, a cross between the smoothness of a musical saw and a poor glockenspiel.

The player holds the flexatone in one hand with the palm around the wire frame and the thumb on the free end of the spring steel.

Its curious penetrating whine is created by rapid oscillation of the little wooden knob at the end of the thin flexible strips against the broad curving metal plate, whose curvature—and hence pitch—is controlled by the thumb.

The instrument is not often used in classical music, but it appears in the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Hans Werner Henze, Sofia Gubaidulina, György Ligeti and others.

[23] Schoenberg employed it, "unrealistically...accurate bursts of widely spaced sounds being hardly obtainable with such abruptness,"[11] in his Variations for Orchestra Op.31 (1928) and his unfinished opera Moses und Aron (1932).

[24] Alfred Schnittke used it in his Faust Cantata (1983), in the Tuba Mirum movement of his Requiem (1975), in his Viola Concerto (1985),[25] and in his score for the ballet Peer Gynt (1987), the flexatone represents the sound of the moaning wind.