I can definitely speak for music here.

In the early Renaissance, modal polyphony reached its peak. Art music, and ecclesiastical music, was written with a set of rules known as "counterpoint". This is a system that dictates which notes are permissible to be played with other notes, how melody lines move and interact, how certain modes behaved with relation to the range and the cadential formulae (how the musical phrase ends), and such. In churches, the only permissible instruments were voice or organ; most music was meant to be performed a capella, which is to say only singing. Before the Protestant reformation, the music was performed only by males, and only by professional singers--the congregation did not sing along, and in fact, would not have been able to due to the highly stylized form of the music. In the church, the music was based off of a cantus firmus, which was usually a chant melody, then set by a composer, meaning that he takes the cantus firmus (which is the melody) and composes contrapunctal lines around it in order to decorate and harmonize the original chant melody. The musical renaissance, however, did not begin until about a hundred years after the period considered historically as the renaissance, so bear in mind I'm speaking of the 15th and 16th centuries here.

Here, however, is an example of some VERY early organ music by the composer John Dunstaple/Dunstable, who was the guy pretty much responsible for what we know as major and minor chords these days, as he was the first composer in the polyphonic tradition to consider the intervals of a 3rd or a 6th as harmonic. (Thank you, England!) Agincourt Hymn

He bridges the medieval period into the early renaissance, where composers stopped using isorhythms and rhythmic modes and were much freer with their rhythmic motion, and began using counterpoint instead of the medieval periods version of harmony, which was generally movement in parallel fourths or fifths, which people must have gotten heartily sick of since those were forbidden by renaissance counterpoint. He, along with Guillaume Dufay, were the two most influential composers of the early Renaissance period, being part of the Burgundian School, a collegium of composers centered around the court of the Duke of Burgundy in the 15th century, and the "idealized" form of musical composition in that time period, forming the Franco-Flemish school.

Instruments were loud and bold. Reedy, noisy, brash. The crumhorn is a good example, or the bombard. These are crumhorns. I myself am a fairly gifted crumhornist, insofar as anyone can be such.

Aside from a very few early songs, we first start to see popular music in the early Renaissance, as this is the first time that it actually survived. Belle qui tiens ma vie This song was more or less....well it was hella popular in every country. Beautiful lyrics.

Another example, where you can clearly hear a cantus firmus and the variations on it, is Antonio de Cabezon's Diferencias sobre el canto llano del caballero The first variation is rather plain and has the melody in the soprano, so it is easily heard. It moves throughout each of the other voices in the variations that follow. This is a heartbreakingly lovely example of early keyboard music from Spain. I personally think that I play this much better, as I disagree with some of the ornaments, but I'm a contentious bastard. Spain had a very different tradition for ornamenting musical lines than did other countries in the same period.

Here also, are two lovely Flemish songs from around the mid to late 1400s. The first, a vocal piece is quite nice, but the second is the real star in my opinion. And you can hear a number of Renaissance instruments here including the cornetto (like a wooden recorder with trumpet style mouthpiece), the crumhorn, and a couple of others. They may sound a bit brash to modern ears but the piece, "Brunette", is one of the most beautiful pieces for woodwind that I can think of.

The lute as well was quite popular, and for that I would do further research on John Dowland, arguably the biggest international superstar of his time, and the master of melancholy lute and vocal pieces. He was prevented from being court composer by his unrepentant Catholicism, and it contributed to his misery by never allowing him to take as prestigious a position in English society as he would have liked, or as he deserved. Here is a fantastic youtube recording, complete with a still from the lute tablature (which is what Dowland originally wrote it in) and the realised version in modern notation. The singer is actually male, and a countertenor, the popularity of which was at its peak at the time when this was composed.

A folksong from long ago that we still have is the ubiquitous Greensleeves, and another that is still played by morris bands everywhere is Gathering Peascods, known in Flanders with a slightly different melody as Unter den linden grune. This song is OLD OLD OLD OLD OLD and very Anglo-Flemish, and more what folk music (read: popular music) of the time would have sounded like--for example, what you'd hear in a tavern rather than a church or at court. (On a side note, Good Queen Bess was a huge populist as far as music---she loved all of this stuff, and particularly was fond of bawdy and vulgar music. Her favorite song, purportedly, was Cold And Raw The North Did Blow, done here by the Baltimore Consort, with my old harpsichord teacher on the keys! (Webb Wiggins) It's dirty, so if you have delicate sensibilities...not NSFW by today's standards, but about on the border of acceptable for public performance at the time, just barely.

If you have more specific questions about music, please let me know. I can go on for pages, and I'm going to cut this short. Thanks, and hope I could help!

ummmmmmmmmmm, what do you mean by renaissance? the renaissance was an intellectual movement that began in Florence and spread northward over the course of the fourteenth through sixteenth century. so the difficulty with the question is that i don't really know what you mean. if you can give me a specific city and time period i would be happy to direct you to a number of useful resources where the answer to these questions can be found.