Flies as musicians (7) — Nature-Symphony 72 (improved version — slowed)

(Improved version — see further below)
Nature-Symphony 72 (Flies as musicians 7: Landscape of pseudo-fugues of the jolly tritone) — A fun piece, using an exuberantly atonal motif, its tritones giving it a sense of depth and pungency. — This is a 9-layer work, with a moderately high level of background sound (mostly wind in the bracken) summed from those layers.

Again I retained the odd aeroplane incursion — for the first time the main one being a jet, though as it fades away a more distant propellor one passes by. As to why I didn't cut it out, believe it or not, it worked really well musically, especially as I passed by the recorder at that time (choosing such disturbed moments to do so, so I could be sure I was not necessitating further bits to be cut out because of rampant Philip disturbances). So, it's ironic that even the noises I produced then all contributed to the effect, together with various flies passing close-by. The reason, of course, was the rhythmic effect of the layer offsets. The overall effect of that section is like a section of an orchestral work in which mostly untuned instruments are playing as a contrast with the standard orchestral textures.

The flies, however, are tuned, and seemingly joyfully stand their ground and see the jet plane out in no uncertain terms, with a startlingly loud flesh fly (Sarcophaga carnaria) giving it a figurative boot up the butt as it recedes. After that episode the landscape is relatively quiet, with a wealth of different flies almost eerily declaiming the atonal motif (often like very quiet sul ponticello playing of violins). Also in that final section, if you listen carefully to the background sound you should be able to make out a gradually increasing general hum of flies (mostly sweat flies, Hydrotaea species), coming from the closely surrounding dense stands of tall bracken.

The odd grasshoppers figure in the work, though I do think the noise reduction reduced the odd ones to inaudibility, and the odd bird calls give punctuation here and there. The distant squealy bird calls, I'm pretty sure, are a juvenile buzzard. They often sound to me like a wonky seagull crying out in pain!
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Why an improved version?

This version has greater clarity and more fine detail discernible through the background wind-in-bracken sound. I've also slowed the sound a little (but not the musical speed, which is determined by the layer offsets), which means in practice that all sounds / notes are slightly longer and thus overall the effect is a tad more friendly and less aggressively percussive in feel.

I'm retaining the original version for the moment (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/757892/ ) because it's got all 5-star ratings so far, but may well delete it if this new version does at least as well for ratings.

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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 — but at least from now on I do have a more effective noise-reduction regime for Nature-Symphonies.

I made the original recording in warm and quite humid weather, during a 4¼ hour session on 16 August 2024 on the top of Cranbrook Down (beside east limb of inner perimeter track of Cranbrook Castle, an ancient hill fort), high above the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. This work uses the second half of that, so the other half will get used for another Nature-Symphony.

Advisory

Important! To get the best out of this, with its mass of detail, listen with high-grade headphones. Despite the better noise reduction this time, this is is still important here because the level of background sound (summed from all layers and amplified in the cathedral reverberation) still makes the finer details more difficult to hear when listening with speakers, and much of the 'action' here is very quiet.
Please note that I slightly misjudged the level of this one (a little too quiet), and a playback volume of some 3dB above a sensible normal listening level should get it about right.

This recording taking place; furry windshield of recorder is the black thing among the sparse stunted bracken on left.

Techie stuff:

Recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on a mini-tripod, set at a low height to reduce wind disturbance. Its mics were set at narrow angle (90°) for post-recording widening and thus zooming-in.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and of course the aforementioned widening, using A1 Stereo Control.

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Noise reduction

Without going into my little saga in struggling to this point, I found that I could improve significantly over the noise reduction used in previous Nature-Symphonies (in Audacity) by using two stages (important to do them in this order):

• the recently added OpenVino AI noise suppression module, using the deepfilternet2 model and attenuation limit set at 7. Amazing that it could be so helpful for my purpose (with care!), considering that it's modelled for extraction of voices / vocals, not natural soundscapes!
• Audacity's standard noise reduction function (spectral subtraction, using a submitted sample of 'clean' and constant unwanted background noise), set to 6dB noise reduction, with frequency smoothing bands set to 3 instead of my previously normal 6 (the default). This way I got the reduction without any noticeable artifacts at all — Wow!

Layer pitch shifts (semitones above / below original): 0, -6, -1, -9, -15, -21, -9, -5, -13;
Layer acoustic: all layers nearer foreground in cathedral.

Slowing was achieved by using Audacity's 'Change speed and pitch' function to lower speed by the amount to lower pitch by a minor third, and then adding +3 semitones to the layer pitch-shifts listed above.

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).

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