Flies as musicians (6a) — Nature-Symphony 71a (revision 2)

(Second revision — see further below)
Nature-Symphony 71a (Flies as musicians 6a: A romp in the shadow of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 1) — 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 with hard-earned work on the background noise reduction 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 first 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're of equal standing.

Why new versions of this one?

(revision 1)
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 mostly an advantage, though it does rather underplay the aeroplanes.

I'd already uploaded here a version of this work improved by OpenVino, but this version, which replaced that one, is the same but with a further, same-intensity, application of that noise-reduction. The clarity so produced is quite dramatic, without obvious distortion or artifacts — just a dynamic range increase.

(revision 2)
In this latest revision I addressed the issue of many of the fly sounds (read 'notes') being over-short and thus sounding abrupt and rather unmusical. I lowered the speed to give pitch reduction of a minor third, then used software to restore the pitch of each layer. That doesn't reduce the musical speed, which is determined by the layer offsets, but it does leave all notes slightly lengthened, making the overall sound somewhat smoother and more musical.
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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 TWO passes of Audacity's OpenVino noise-suppression plugin, using the deepfilternet2 model and noise attenuation set to 12 both times. After that an EQ tilt away from the treble was necessary, then with upward level adjustment to ensure that the quietest details could still be heard.

Layer pitch shifts (semitones above / below original): +4, +3, 0, -6, -4, -2, -10, -14 -18;

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 musical speed of any layers; only pitch gets changed (using kHs Pitch Shifter Pro).

The slight lengthening of all sounds (and thus notes) was achieved by use of Audacity's 'Change speed and pitch' function, then restoring the pitch by adding +3 semitones to the real-time pitch-shift of each layer (using kHs Pitch-Shifter).

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