Miscellanea (music)

Miscellanea refers to devices that imitate sounds from nature and everyday life. It can also be used to generate artificial sounds that cannot be heard in the environment. Because of the abundance of diverse musical instruments that produce such tones, they are collectively referred to as a miscellanea.

Effects devices

This group of instruments is often used in dance music and as an opera prop.

Air sources

Pipes

The simple signal whistle is a very small shrill beaked metal flute. Their combination of three, put together in a T, in which the different sizes can be exchanged immediately by turning, is known as the Samba Whistle. If 3 signal whistles are connected in parallel and assigned to a single mouthpiece, a triple tone is produced.

In the whistle , as it is used by the police and sports referees, the blowing edge belongs to the opening of a small cavity resonator (ball or cylinder) in which a ball jumping around through the vortex makes the sound a trill . The bird's voice has an analogous structure with a filling container . The chirping of birds can be imitated by the gurgling water .

Car horn

The ancient car horn works on the principle of the harmonica reeds . The generator is located at the entrance of a more or less long and winding horn. The air is delivered squeezing a rubber ball. The instrument is part of the street noise in George Gershwin's " An American in Paris " (1928).

siren

In 1819 Charles Cagniard de la Tour invented the siren to measure the audio frequency , which later found everyday use as a ship and factory siren. A disc is provided with holes drilled at an angle along a circle so that it is set in rotation by a stream of air blown against it. However, this movement interrupts the same air supply at a frequency that falls within the tone range if the speed is sufficient. In a small version, as a mouth siren, it becomes a toy or an effect instrument that, for example, howls briefly at the end in Paul Hindemith's "Kammermusik Nr.1" (1921).

Structure-borne noise

anvil

The anvil , the scaled-down, identical version of a real blacksmith's anvil , is available in 4 different sizes and corresponding sound ranges. It is hit with a metal hammer. Jean-Baptiste Lully already saw the anvil ( Isis 1677), but it also appears in more modern operas, such as B. in Trovatore (1853) by Giuseppe Verdi and, as is well known, in Richard Wagner's Siegfried (1876), where the anvil, which is prepared for spectacular splitting, can be seen on the stage, but the one to be heard is in the orchestra pit.

Horse hooves

Two devices are used to imitate the sound of horse's hooves:

2 half coconut shells that you hit against each other. A conscious play with this effect element can be found in Monty Python's " The Knights of the Coconut ".
2 cylindrical wooden bells, closed at the top as a hemisphere, which are glued to a board next to each other at their straight edge. You hit them alternately with a drumstick, creating uneven sounds.

Thunder sheet

A few meters long, suspended sheet of steel gives a good imitation of thunder when shaken or hit with mallets of various hardness. It can be heard in John Cage's " First Construction " for percussion sextet (1939).

Wind machine

A bulky machine is used to imitate the wind, for example in Richard Strauss' " Don Quixote " (1897) or " Eine Alpensinfonie " (1915). It consists of wide wooden cylinders about 70 cm in diameter, which can be rotated by means of cranks and from which wooden strips protrude parallel to the axis. These brush against a jute cloth stretched around it. The desired imitation succeeds with skillfully irregular rotation.

Friction instruments

Painted metal

Nail fiddle

The singing saw is crossed with the string bow. Compared to strings, which are also bowed, the difference is in the body's own strength, which is not only gained by clamping. The same characteristic applies to the nail violin invented by Johann Wilde in the middle of the 18th century . Along the edge of a flat half- or three-quarter circle resonator, 12, 18 or 24 iron pins of different lengths and thicknesses were lined up vertically, which were excited to transverse vibrations by a bow of a bow.

With eardrum

Friction drum

These drums are not only struck, but also made to sound by rubbing the fur with the fingers or the palm of the hand.

Forest devil

This children's instrument, which comes from China and produces humming tones, has a relatively simple construction. A cord wraps around the rosin- impregnated ring notch of a handle. The other end is tied in the middle of the membrane of a light drum. If you swing the drum vertically in a circle (flying friction drum), the friction of the cord in the notch creates a friction noise which is transmitted through the cord to the eardrum, where it is amplified and emitted. The forest devil was used, among other things, to chase away birds in vineyards.

Grating drum

The friction drum is widespread in many cultures and in the most varied of forms worldwide. What they have in common is a fur that is stimulated in the middle by rubbing with strings or chopsticks. An elementary variant of this instrument is characterized by a hole in the middle of the eardrum through which a rope is pulled or a rod is pushed and pulled rhythmically. Another form with a similar approach is to put on a stick held between the palms of the hands. When the hands are rubbing against each other, the skin rotates, causing the skin to rustle through surface friction.

Drumming with the friction stick

The rod placed vertically in the middle on the eardrum can also be firmly connected to it. Then the rod is rubbed lengthways, so that longitudinal vibrations are transmitted to the skin. The process is made easier by rubbing your hands with rosin . Such an elementary instrument called caccavella or pu-ti-pu belongs to the traditional, noisy folk festivals of Piedigrotta , along with the triccaballacca . A well-known representative of this group is the Cuíca .

Electric sound generators

Neo Bechstein grand piano

The Neo Bechstein grand piano was one of the first products of fruitful collaboration between physical laboratories and traditional instrument making. In 1928, at the suggestion of physicist Walter Nernst, Bechstein built this instrument, in which the sound of strings struck by small hammers (micro-hammers) was stretched, crescended or strongly attenuated by means of electrical feedback and colored by filter circles.

Trautonium

The acoustician Friedrich Trautwein (1888–1956) constructed the Trautonium as a purely electronic instrument in 1930 in Berlin with the Hindemith student Oskar Sala . Tone generators were electronic trigger circuits . In this single-part instrument , which can be heard over loudspeakers, a manual regulates the pitch , and the press of a key regulates the volume. Electric filter circuits created the timbres . Paul Hindemith wrote a Concertino for Trautonium as early as 1931 . Also Harald Genzmer dedicated to him in 1939 a concert. It became famous for the imitation of all the bird calls in the Hitchcock film The Birds of Sala.

Ondes Martenot

The Ondes Martenot by Maurice Martenot (1889-1980) is a monophonic electronic instrument constructed in 1928, which became so important that the Paris College of Music set up a chair for it. Sound generators are resonant circuits here. Frequency-setting elements are either switched over at the touch of a button or controlled continuously, for which purpose a band with a grip ring is passed along the keyboard . Electric filter circuits are used here to color the sound. In addition, Martenot took advantage of the fundamental imperfection of the loudspeakers of his time to the extent that he used different types for additional sound coloring. The control of the left hand, which not only has to operate the filters, but also, above all, determines the timing and shape of each tone plays an essential role in mastering this instrument.

Organ replacement / keyboard

An early attempt to imitate organ sounds was realized in the optical sound organ . Photo-electronic scanning of motorized rotated glass panes with recorded sine waves results in partial tone oscillations, the addition of which produces timbres with adjustable amplitudes . For the actual organ imitation, the sound curves of real organs are applied to the discs. A similar principle can also be found in the Hammond organ .

The actual, pure electronics began their triumphant advance in 1964 with the synthesizers , in which the desired fundamental tone is entered by control after all sound components have been predetermined with an almost infinite number of possible variations. It is not only possible to select the partial tone composition that is also variable over time, but also the envelope curve of the tone color-forming oscillation process and the shape of the decay. There are also numerous ring modulators available, resulting in extremely versatile coupling options, including with external sound sources.

literature

Ermanno Briner: Reclam's musical instrument guide. The instruments and their acoustics (= Universal Library 10349). Philipp Reclan jun GmbH, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-15-010349-5 .