Transformed wind chimes: Nature-Symphony 24

Nature-Symphony 24 (Secret Forest — Bringer of joyful dreams) — This is what I was working on when I filched its exquisite three bamboo chime layers to create Nature-Symphony 23. It has the same three bamboo layers, though with the odd amendments, but in this case those three bamboo layers are combined with two more layers, which are made from the very gentle second half of the metal chime recording whose first, much more intense, half is the substance of Nature-Symphony 22.

As the title suggests, this is a deeply contemplative and 'dreamy' work. For me personally the metal chime here would be frustratingly slothful, but for the lovely skittishness of the little bamboo chime, which even when much slowed down still comes across as pretty lively at times. I arranged the overall pitches of the bamboo chime layers so that they would key in partially with the metal chime layers, with some mild dissonance between certain notes. That's not enough to give a sense of discord, but it does give additional piquancy and tension to the already beautifully piquant bamboo chime sound, with a certain gentle push-pull effect between the two chimes, as though they're competing for your attention. The metal chime recording includes some bird song. Most of it appears to be robin.

As in Nature-Symphony 23, the bamboo chime sounds in this work remind me of Olivier Messiaen's impersonations of bird songs in certain of his organ compositions (such as Livre d'Orgue), when played in a really large church or cathedral, though here one's attention is more divided, and it really is more like wildlife in a forest containing very large trees. Incidentally, I didn't come up with the title first and try to make anything give a forest impression. — As usual, I just tried putting certain chime sounds together in a manner that I intuited would be evocative of something worthwhile, and the title was then suggested by what I'd created.

Chimes used:

Layers 1–3:

Small (30cm longest tube) 6-tube Indonesian bamboo 'Fancy dim7' (my identifying name for it) — one of three amazingly cheap ornamented small chimes bought in a Christmas market; this one having a colourful sound, producing intervals and chords of second-inversion minor, diminished seventh, tritone, fourth, minor sixth, with a lot of emphasis on the minor third. The layering has created a lot of tritone emphasis, at times also with half-diminished seventh chord, giving a musical potency and piquancy of colour beyond that already present in the original chime sound. — I must say, I'm quite amazed that I could get such powerful and commanding tone in Layer 3 from such a little and lightweight chime!

Layers 4, 5:

solo metal 8-tube chime: Davis Blanchard The Blues (tuned to a a gentle Blues scale)

I made the original metal chime recording for this work on 16 February 2017, on the rough slope just below Hunting Gate, which latter marks the highest point of the Hunter's Path, high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, and the bamboo chime recording on 13 December 2023, on Piddledown, just a little above the Hunter's Path, a bit further west, quite near Castle Drogo.

Advisory
To get the best out of this, listen with high-grade headphones.

Making an earlier recording of this chime (in same session), from a lower position to avoid over-strong wind.

Making the recording following the original one for this work. The 'The Blues' chime looked identical to the Pluto chime in this photo, and for this recording there were no bamboo chimes.

Techie stuff:
The recorder for both original recordings was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested Windcut furry windshields, but:

**For the metal chime the mics were at wide angle (120°), and a Zipshot Mini tripod was used;
**For the bamboo chime the mics were at narrow angle (90°), and the tripod was an Aoka carbon fibre Mini.

Basic post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields, and (for the bamboo chime) stereo widening (135%) in the A1 Stereo Control VST plugin. Then I applied my custom extreme wind-cut preset in TDR Nova GE to drastically reduce the bass aspect of the wind noise.

Further processing for the bamboo chime recording was to use Audacity's noise reduction function to reduce consistent basic background sound (mostly River Teign far below) by two steps of 6dB, and (in WavePad) using CurveEQ to tailor a severe high-pass filter (two 12dB increments) to virtually eliminate frequencies significantly below the chime's lowest pitch (close to 700Hz).

To create this Nature-Symphony I made three copies of the bamboo recording thus edited, as follows:

Layer 1: reduced speed to achieve pitch of an octave below original — acoustic: back of cathedral

Layer 2: reduced speed to achieve an octave below original, then (in Audacity) reduced pitch only by a further tritone — acoustic: back of cathedral

Layer 3: reduced speed to achieve a pitch of two octaves and a tritone below original — acoustic: back of cathedral

…And I made two copies of the second (gentle and relatively undramatic) half of the original recording, to be used as layers in Audacity, and processed them as follows:

Layer 4: reduced speed to achieve pitch of an octave below original — acoustic: back of cathedral

Layer 5: reduced speed to achieve an octave plus a fourth below original — acoustic: back of cathedral

For both layers, immediately following the speed reduction I also used my 'Extreme wind-cut' preset in TDR-Nova GE to greatly minimize microphone wind noise, and used Voxengo CurveEQ to tame the over-loud sustained tone (different in the two layers, most invasive in the top layer — though I deliberately didn't reduce it further).

I aligned those two layers so that they started playing simultaneously, but because of the slower speed of Layer 5, this gets increasingly out of step with Layer 1.

As usual when dealing with a multi-layer setup, I had to do a little juggling with positioning of particular events in the different layers to produce a seemingly meaningful end, and trimming off the excess length of tracks as appropriate.

The geolocation given is for the metal chime.

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