Flies as musicians (9) — Nature-Symphony 74

Nature-Symphony 74 (Flies as musicians 9: Dance of solace, after Mt Everest rockfall) — A further new departure and great fun piece, with musical depth: flies (12 layers) with bamboo wind chimes (large and small, one layer each). Along with the flies and bees / bumblebees, birds (mostly juvenile buzzard, but also some linnet contact calls), grasshoppers and the odd propeller aeroplane all play their part. The motif configured for those 12 layers is adapted from movement 2 of my Symphony 1 (Sagarmatha).

That motif is an uneasy one, particularly because of its third (last) 4-note phrase, which finishes by descending by a major third, which, in conventional major-minor tonality, tells the listener that it's leading onto another phrase that would give a proper sense of completion — but that completion isn't there, as though it were a human life having been cut short. It therefore feels troubled, at least when you hear that third phrase clearly.
Also, its last note, whose pitch 'should' be consonant with the opening pitch, is actually an octave plus major seventh lower — decidedly dissonant, though the intervening whole octave mitigates the sense of overt discord when they come together (from different flies), just giving an uneasy feeling of the thread having been cut off before it could find any comfort or sense of release.

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 flies / bees recording in sultry weather on 16 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; this work uses the first half of it. The large and small bamboo chimes were recorded on 13 and 11 December 2023 respectively on Piddledown, high up on north side of Teign Gorge.

Advisory

Important!
To get the best out of this, with its mass of detail, listen with high-grade headphones.

The flies / bees recording taking place; furry windshield of recorder is the black thing among the sparse stunted bracken on left.

Techie stuff:

For all recordings the recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on a carbon-fibre tripod, set at a low height to reduce wind disturbance. For all three recordings the mics were set at their narrowest angle (90°) for widening afterwards and so zooming-in.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and widening the original 90° mic angle with A1 Stereo Control to approx. 120°, my normal wide-angle setting, thus zooming-in and minimizing 'offstage' sound level.

For noise-reduction the chimes had standard Audacity noise reduction using spectral subtraction, and for the flies / bees recording I used both that and two modest applications of the OpenVino AI sound-suppression plugin.

Layer pitch shifts (semitones above / below original): Flies / bees +7, +2, 0, -5, -12, -9, -10, -14, +7, -10, 0, -16; chimes half-speed (-12), with very short section of layer 14 further reduced to -24.

Layer acoustic: layers 1-12: nearer foreground in cathedral; layers 13+14: moderate back-of-cathedral.

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

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