Trombone and NOISE

Hi everyone!! It has been awhile!!

Sunday night I decided to spend some time listening to pieces for trombone I haven’t ever given a chance. The first thing up was Peter Ablinger’s Posaune und Rauschen or Trombone and Noise. Here is Weston Olencki’s recording, an interpreter of the premier performance.

Now I understand that this isn’t everyones cup of tea, but I am always trying to learn something new. I’ve always found solo instruments with electronics to be very cool, but I never knew where to start. This is a simple piece of music that is composed of glissandi and synthetic noises, so how hard could it be?

The top line is the “noise” and the bottom line is the trombone. What makes this such a cool piece is the HOW TO in creating the noise. This is where MAMMUT comes in to the picture. MAMMUT is a free program that takes ANY sound file and uses FAST Fourier transforms to create a new sound. In our case, we would record each individual gliss from the score above as separate mono files, upload them into MAMMUT and generate this eerie verticalization of the gliss creating a chord of every tone/microtone from the beginning to the end of the gliss!

I’m still doing my own research on what FFT actually is as this is a completely new genre to me. Not a particularly complicated piece of music, but I have personally never done anything with trombone and noise before and felt this was a good introduction to the genre.  I documented how I did it exactly since Mammut isn’t very user friendly and I definitely had to reach out to reddit and email some bloggers that have made posts on it!

The entire composition with score is at the end of the video lasting only 3 minutes or so! If you re curious how to compose something NEW using Mammut, follow my video as a how-to guide!

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