Auxiliary percussion, also known as ancillary percussion, toys, or sound effects, refers to a variety of smaller percussion instruments, especially those that aren’t standard in the orchestra. Using the standard categories for percussion instrument classification, we can say that most auxiliary percussion instruments are either aerophones (instruments that make sound with air) or idiophones (instruments that make sound with the material they are made of rather than a sound-making tool like a bow or a reed).
Sirens and whistles are examples of auxiliary percussion aerophones. This group of instruments is primarily responsible for adapting sounds from the “real world” to the orchestral setting. Some of them are based on alarm sounds. Whistles come in a variety of materials, including plastic, wood, and metal. Some whistles are designed for a single pitch, while others have several.
The siren is a small boat warning signal with a rising and falling pitch. Auxiliary percussion includes realistic-sounding tugboat and locomotive whistles, which are recognizable as the sound we write as “choo choo” in children’s books.
A wide variety of bird whistles can also be classified as auxiliary percussion. Cuckoo, dove, and pigeon, nightingale, jay, and magpie, and warbler are among them. Then there’s the samba whistle, also known as a carnival whistle, which is an important component of Brazilian music with up to three tones.
Auxiliary percussion includes a wide range of idiophones, which we’ll look at in three groups. When struck with a mallet or beater, percussion idiophones produce sound. The triangle, a metal instrument in the shape of a triangle suspended and struck with a metal beater; and woodblocks, hollowed blocks of wood with a slit opening, often in sets of three pitched high, medium, and low; and Chinese or Korean temple blocks, wooden chambers that typically come in sets of five, pitched from high to low. The brake drum, a piece of an automobile that can be played with drum sticks, and the thunder sheet, which can be beaten or shaken to make a thunderstorm sound, are also included.
Scraped idiophones are a second set of idiophones included in the auxiliary percussion. The musical saw, a pitched instrument held between the knees and played with a violin bow; and sandpaper blocks, blocks of wood with sandpaper attached and rubbed together to make a scraping sound, are all included in this category.
Finally, we’ll look at the shook idiophones. Rifles and shakers are solid shapes filled with loose particles that make a sound hitting against the sides and other particles in this category of auxiliary percussion. Sleigh bells, a set of bells attached to a cloth band, and the tambourine, which can be shaken to set the metal disks jangling, are also included in this group. Surprisingly, if the tambourine has a head and is struck to produce sound, it is classified as a membranophone because the tone is created vibrating the stretched membrane.