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Creating orchestral textures

Take a busy orchestral piece, and remove the busy bits, to create tense atmospheric textures

Atmospheric textures

Emerging Dances

For most of the time, David Horne's piece Emerging Dances has a busy, rhythmic and energetic sound. But behind all this activity are some tense atmospheric sounds.

If you pick these sounds out on their own, you can create totally new orchestral textures.

Green find icon image

In the Explorer below, of Emerging Dances, the green links go to bars from the beginning of the piece that have slow, sustained sounds. Click on the ‘find’ buttons to go to each bar.

'Focus on part' button image

And if you use the 'focus on' buttons, on whatever track the links go to, you can listen to each sound on its own.

Select Bars and Hand buttons image

Then select the bars from each link and copy them to the clipboard. Hold down shift and click to select multiple bars at once.

Composer button image

If you go to the Composer, you can paste the copied bars from the clipboard into a new piece. Try experimenting with different combinations of sounds and see what atmostpheric textures you can create.

Hand and Snap button images

You can use the Hand tool to move the bars in your composition to different places. And if you turn on 'Snap' the bars will align with each other with you move them.

Here's an example of what you could make out of these three different sounds.