Flies as musicians (6b) — Nature-Symphony 71b (Revision 1)

(Revision 1 (improvements overdone!) — see further below. There's a more balanced new version at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/765131/ .)
Nature-Symphony 71b (Flies as musicians 6b: A romp in the shadow of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2) — using a motif drawn from the sort of scale and chords that tend to characterize music of Ralph Vaughan Williams in works such as his Sinfonia Antartica. — This is a 9-layer work, but amazingly I've now succeeded in bringing down the summed background sound from all layers dramatically, to give a real clean sound. For the first time in any of my recordings, I deliberately gave pride of place in the opening, to — of all calamitous things! — a couple of aeroplanes, one closely following the other.

I came to realize that a propeller-driven aeroplane, at a reasonable distance, often produces a tone that is just as amenable to my Nature-Symphony treatment as any self-respecting fly or wind chime, so then I regretted having cut all aeroplanes out of all my recordings during routine editing, regardless of their musical potential. Here the opening aeroplane sounds like a beautifully menacing organ playing, while the flies work hard to increasingly get in on the act. At the end of the work I added a reprise of part of the opening, but with the order of layer offsets reversed, so that the motif is then upside-down, and I raised the pitch of all the layers of that reprise by a semitone, giving a brighter feel to end the work.

This is the second of two versions of this work, using the same recording and the same layer organisation. The one difference is the pitches of the layers, describing different Vaughan-Williams derived motifs. To me they are of equal standing.

Why a new version of this one?
The original recording, although great for flies and a reasonable number of bees, and some nicely musical aeroplane sound, suffered from the background sound of the wind in the close-by dense stands of bracken. Because that's inevitably a continuously varying sound, I couldn't sensibly use Audacity's standard function (spectral subtraction) for reducing that, and eventually, clutching at straws, tried using an AI noise-reduction plugin (OpenVino) recently added to Audacity. Although it's allegedly modelled for cleaning-up voices and vocals, I found that this recording was one of those that got effectively cleaned-up by that module. My experience so far is that its effectiveness varies a lot between different natural soundscape recordings, and it appears always to increase dynamic range, which could be a no-no for many purposes. Here the increased dynamic range is actually overdone, which is why I produced a further, more balanced, version of this.

I'd already uploaded here a version of this work improved by OpenVino, but this version, which replaces that one, is the same but with two further, same-intensity, applications of that noise-reduction. The clarity so produced is quite dramatic, without obvious distortion or artifacts — just a dynamic range increase, which I recognised retrospectively as too big, making the flies sound ugly and aggressive, and with too little background sound so that it sounds almost to be a studio recording at times.

Unsatisfactory constraints on all the flies Nature-Symphonies are primarily that (a) the sequence of layer offset durations is fixed for the whole work, so every sound will repeat the same quasi-melodic / rhythmic pattern (no rhythmic variation apart from the flies' antics), giving a rather mechanical effect in many places, and (b) such a large number of layers means a quite high sum total of background noise, even after my best endeavours at noise-reduction.

I made the original recording in warm and quite humid weather, as the final recording in a 4¼ hour session on 30 August 2024 on the top of Cranbrook Down (south-west corner of inner perimeter track of Cranbrook Castle, an ancient hill fort), high above the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. The recorder was facing some flowering wood sage plants, which were quite popular with the local bees, and it's the latter that give most of the longer notes and chord effects.

Advisory

Important!
1. To get the best out of this, with its mass of detail, listen with high-grade headphones.
2. Because of the big dynamic range, it's important that the volume level of the loudest (closest) flies be quite loud. If you can't hear the organ-like aeroplane sound distinctly (but not loud) at the very beginning, you need to return to beginning and turn up the volume till you can hear that aeroplane (itself moderately quiet).

Arrow shows recording position; the recorder was facing the small spikes of wood sage flowers, just to right of the arrow.

Techie stuff:

Recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on a Sirui carbon-fibre tripod, set at a low height to reduce wind disturbance.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield.

For noise-reduction, after much experimentation I used THREE passes of Audacity's OpenVino noise-suppression plugin, using the deepfilternet2 model and noise attenuation set to 12 each time. Yes, for some reason this required more noise reduction than Nature-Symphony 71a, which is just the same but with different pitch shifts for the layers. After that an EQ tilt away from the treble was necessary, then with upward level adjustment to ensure that the quietest details could just be heard — which makes the foreground flies sound quite intimidatingly up-front at times!

Layer pitch shifts (semitones above / below original): +5, +4, 2, -2, -6, -10, -18, -16 -14;
Layer acoustic: all layers middling foreground in cathedral.
Reprise = all tunings +1 and offset sequence reversed, so the motif is now reversed and sounds as if upside-down.

Note that in this and all the other flies Nature-Symphonies I'm not changing speed of any layers; only pitch gets changed (using kHs Pitch Shifter Pro).

Please remember to give this recording a rating — Thank you!