Transformed wind chimes & natural soundscape: Nature-Symphony 75

Nature-Symphony 74 (Autumn colour and shadows, with rutting stags) — A surreal reverie landscape of autumn fallen-leaf colour and mellowness of light, with shadows pointing to darker, harsher days to come. This work has 9 layers in immediate practical terms, but in reality it's 15 layers, because three layers are mixes themselves, two of which are octave doublings, and, the third and most notable, layer 9, which is actually the whole of Nature-Symphony 14 (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/707360/ ), which iteslf is a 5-layer work. Layers 5 and 6 of this work are a moderately low-pitched octave doubling that imparts a somewhat menacing autumnal quality to the soundscape, very much suggestive of unexplored deep shadows.

Sound sources

(Layers 1–3)
Indonesian bamboo chime, small (6 tubes, longest c. 30cm) — Sonorous, notionally sounding a diminished 7th chord, but emphasizing a radiant quartal-type chord of a fourth containing a minor third with a whole tone at the bottom; this is enriched by its harmonics, and more so in the lower transpositions, and indeed almost obliterated by exciting harmonics in the lowest-pitched Layer 3.

(Layers 4–8)
Davis Blanchard The Blues chime — 8-tube galvanized steel chime, tuned to a Blues scale. At face value it has a laid-back sort of sound, just with the one dissonant note in the mix. However, when its sound is slowed down in particular, and especially when it's presented in differently pitched offset layers, as here, it has an intensely radiant sort of sound, made compelling by a certain shifting harmonic tension that is persistently calling into quizzical question that impression of 'laid-backness'. This is the second half of the recording the first half of which I used in Nature-Symphony 22 (Solar rays — The Sun's 'Poem of Ecstasy') (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/714184/ ). The wind dropped fairly abruptly in the middle of that recording, so what we have here is much gentler and more reflective in sound, rather than blazingly ecstatic.

(Layer 9)
The entire Nature-Symphony 14, with no changes apart from small level adjustment to balance with the other layers.

I made the chimes recordings by the Hunter's Path, high-up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. The bamboo chime was recorded on 13 December 2023 on Piddledown, and the The Blues chime was recorded on 16 February 2017, on the rough slope just below Hunting Gate. I made the rutting stags recording, used in Nature-Symphony 14 (Layer 9 here), on 22 October 2023, quite well up on the wooded slope of Cranbrook Down, overlooking the Fingle Bridge defile, also in the Teign Gorge.

Advisory

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

The original rutting stags recording taking place.

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 the bamboo chime and rutting stags recordings the mics were set at their narrowest angle (90°) for widening afterwards and so zooming-in; the The Blues.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and, for the bamboo and The Blues chimes, 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 bamboo chime had standard Audacity noise reduction using spectral subtraction, and the The Blues chime had just strong reduction of mic wind noise using my 'extreme wind cut' preset (dynamic EQ) in TDR Nova GE, and in this project in Audacity I used a global less extreme wind-cut preset in the same software.

Layer pitch shifts (semitones above / below original): L1 -8 (half-speed), L2 -20 (qtr-speed), L3 mix (-16+-30) (c. ⅓-speed), L4 -12 (half-speed), L5 -18 (qtr-speed), L6 -30 (qtr-speed), L7 -30 (qtr-speed), L8 mix (-36+-48) (qtr-speed), L9 Nature-Symphony 14 (0, -2, -6, -8, -12)

Layer acoustic: acoustic: L1 middling foreground in cathedral, L2 moderate back of cathedral, L3 back of cathedral, L4-6 moderate back of cathedral, L7+8 back of cathedral, L9 (no change).

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