Transformed natural soundscape and wind chime: Nature-Symphony 26

Nature-Symphony 26 (Celebration of skylarks, wind and the unknown) — Skylarks as you'll never have heard them before! — And so many! Here we have one recording of skylarks on Cut Hill, claimed to be the remotest spot in southern England. That recording is presented here in five layers — the top layer as recorded, and each subsequent layer slowed to sound a major third below the last (as one goes down the list). That then subtly fills the whole soundscape with augmented triads. Skylark song isn't identifiable to precise musical pitch, so those augmented triads most likely wouldn't be overtly recognisable to anyone, but they do add a certain subtle colourfulness to the overall chorus. As well as skylarks we hear the very occasional distant meadow pipit song, and right at the end we get a few rather startling meadow pipit alarm calls — no doubt caused by my approaching the recorder to turn it off. Additionally there is a remarkably musical passing fly…

…The five skylark layers are aligned such that the aforementioned passing fly is heard something like a couple of seconds later in each layer from top to bottom, so you can hear the major thirds and augmented triads being spelled out horizontally. You may also notice that the fly alternates in flight direction each successive time you hear it — of course because this naughty monkey swapped channels of alternate tracks, not only to achieve that effect but also to even out the distribution of singing skylarks.

As for the bamboo chime recording, presented in three layers, this was to provide a contrasting element to harmoniously counter the unremittingness of the skylark chorus and the gusty wind chasing around and through the peat hags and tussocks of moor grass. I had an intuition from the beginning that it would need to be a small bamboo chime, with a relatively high and lightweight sound, and the big challenge was going to be to see if any bamboo chime in my possession would produce intervals and chords that keyed in with the skylarks and all the subtle major thirds and augmented triads there in the chorus. In the event the one I first picked out to try turned out to be the most suitable, and to sound really nice and harmonious in the mix. The next challenge was to see if I could get a really effective reverb for the chimes, which would make them sound optimally musical while not materially dominating the soundstage and ruining the remote wilderness experience (in absolute terms an impossible task!)

Sound sources used:

Layers 1–5: field recording of skylarks and wind on Cut Hill, Dartmoor

Layers 6-8: Bamboo chime, small (30cm longest tube) (sounding notes on the whole-tone scale when heard 'live'). The weird thing is that with the reduced pitches I use in my Nature Symphonies (normally at least an octave below original), it no longer sounds 'whole-tone' at all. Whole-tone sound would probably have fitted even better, but this one still fits my bill.

I made the original skylarks recording on 6 May 2013 on the immediate summit area of the very broad Cut Hill in the middle of the north section of Dartmoor, Devon, UK. The bamboo chime recording was made on 11 December 2023, beside the Hunter's Path, high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK.

You can hear the original skylarks recording at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/667372/ . The latter is actually a concatenation of four recordings made at different spots on the summit area, and this recording forms approximately the first quarter of that.

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

View during this recording session. Two recorders were running, and this is the other one. The recorder for this recording was sheltered by one of the skyline peat scarps in the centre of this view.

Making a recording of the large bamboo chime in the same session and on the same branch as the original recording for this work; the chime used for this looked just the same but smaller.

Techie stuff:

The recorder for the skylarks was a Sony PCM-M10 with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield (the original, more effective, light grey version), on Hama Mini tripod (not just mini but tiny!), reasonably sheltered from wind by a peat hag.

Basic post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and, much more recently, stereo widening (160%) using 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.

For this Nature-Symphony I made five copies of the recording thus edited, and, as already noted, kept the top layer unchanged, while the further successive layers are each a major third lower than the one above, and correspondingly slower. The bottom of those five layers also has a modest-intensity 'deep cave' reverberation, so giving an other-worldly effect.

Recorder for the bamboo chime was Sony PCM-D100, with two nested Windcut furry windshields, and mics set at narrow angle (90°), on an Aoka carbon fibre Mini tripod (keeping close to ground in order to minimize mic wind noise).

Basic post-recording processing (in Audacity) was to apply an EQ preset to correct for muffling by the windshields, and subsequently, in A1 Stereo Control, widening of the stereo image by 135%.

Then I applied my custom extreme wind-cut preset in TDR Nova GE to drastically reduce the bass aspect of the wind noise. I further used Audacity's noise reduction function to reduce consistent basic background sound (mostly River Teign far below) by two steps of 6dB, and (in WavePad) used CurveEQ to tailor a severe high-pass filter (two 12dB increments) to virtually eliminate frequencies significantly below the chime's lowest pitch.

I made three copies of part of the recording, and reduced their speed, to get respective pitches of an octave, an octave plus a minor 6th, and two octaves below the original. I gave them each an attenuated version of the 'deep cave' factory preset in the OrilRiver VST plugin.

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