Transformed wind chimes: Nature-Symphony 36

Nature-Symphony 36 (Surreal landscape of contradictory impressions!) — A quite challenging but dreamy sort of soundscape embracing some rather surreal contradictions. A lot of this comes down to the overall soundscape having very much a moonlit quality, suggesting night, with rugged sections suggestive of crags or cliffs looming up — yet we have at times quite a lot of springtime birdsong, which wouldn't significantly be nocturnal — primarily blue tit, chaffinch and robin, though with others. Also, the two metal chimes together, when their sound is well-balanced between the two, are dissonant to the extent of downright discord — especially if your're listening without a wide stereo separation. The beauty of this piece, therefore, depends on the widely varying degrees of imbalance between the two. That way, the brief phases of outright discord soon gain meaning and the sense of some sort of beauty through being like the soil out of which the wild flowers and trees grow, the discord dissolving, often in almost amoeboid fashion, into recognisable and fully meaningful harmonies again.

Then there is the weird contrast between the two metal chimes. The Twilight chime has an almost whining, plaintive sound, which often tends to go rather moronically repeating the same few notes over and over, while the Debussy Bells chime, with its whole-tone scale tuning, has a brilliant silvery sort of tone, intensely mysterious, which emerges dramatically from the decidedly autumnal and perhaps rather gloomy sound of the Twilight chime. It's disappointing to me that in the original recording the Debussy chime didn't sound nearly as much as the Twilight one did, so we get too much of the latter. As they were recorded as a duo together with bamboo chimes, there's nothing I can do to adjust the balance between any of them. That issue arose simply because the chimes were well separated physically, and fewer wind gusts caught the Debussy one.

Why did I include a separate bamboo chime when the original recording already had bamboo sound? — Because the small bamboo in the original recording was more or less inaudible, and even the large one was sounding less often than really needed for this work.

The slow-moving nature of the metal chimes sound required some ongoing or at least frequent fairly frisky activity, so I carefully chose one of my small bamboo chimes to fit the bill, deployed in two layers whose pitch was separated by a tritone. Those two layers were set at a rather low volume level so as not to dominate the stage till at the very end for a few seconds just as the metal chimes had left the stage — where their beautiful musicality invites me to make some sort of additional Nature-Symphony using that chime in a more prominent role, in the same layer configurations as here. Throughout this work as a whole, with its closer acoustic, the small chime is suggestive of all the little comings and goings of Mother Nature in the foreground — the many flies and other insects flitting around, voles, shrews and other little mammals and other animals skitting around in the ground vegetation

The original field recordings for the metal layers are: Debussy Bells https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/686909/, and the Twilight: https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/686234/ .

For detailed information about the Davis Blanchard chimes, please see https://www.philipgoddard.com/shop/store-2-windchimes.htm, just scrolling down a little.

Chimes used:

Layers 1+2:

Davis Blanchard Twilight (8 tubes, tuned to a weird bunch of pitches, which give potent intervals and chords, notably augmented triad, minor major seventh, minor triad, major seventh, and a poignant repeating descending minor second (semitone), but, unlike in my Nature-Symphony Prelude 2 (https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/724016/ ), one doesn't much notice those details here, which seem to be largely merged into the chime's overall sound).

Davis Blanchard Debussy Bells (8 tubes, tuned to the whole-tone scale, tending to emphasize the tritone)

Indonesian bamboo chimes, large + small (6 tubes each, but the small one is hardly heard in this recording)

Layers 3+4: Indonesian ornamented bamboo chime (small, c. 30cm longest tube) (5 tubes, tuned to a potent pitch sequence; it was originally 6-tube, but I had to remove the shortest tube because I managed to tread on its tip, splitting it — that eliminating its musical tone)

I made the metal / bamboo chimes recording for this work on 24 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. The small bamboo chime recording dates from 11 December 2023, on Piddledown, slightly below the Hunter's Path. The given geolocation is for the metal chimes recording.

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

Making the main recording used here. You can see why the bamboo chimes are mostly not as prominent as wanted, for I'd placed them too far back, and the small chime was behind the large one, helping to ensure that it wouldn't get noticed in the recording. I'm surprised that I failed to do better than that, because that spot had a fair choice of branches to hang chimes on.
The arrow points to the recorder.

Recording the small bamboo chime used in this work; one can just see the gap on its far side, where I had to remove its shortest (highest-sounding) tube.

Techie stuff:

The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields, on a Zipshot Mini tripod (metal chimes) and shorter Aoka Mini tripod (bamboo chime).

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields; for the separate bamboo chime recording I applied background and mic wind noise reduction.

Deployment of layers is as follows:

Layer 1: half-speed, making it an octave below original — acoustic: moderate back of cathedral;

Layer 2: speed for an octave plus minor sixth below original, and pitch further reduced to 2 octaves below original — acoustic: back of cathedral;

Layer 3: Speed reduced to give pitch a tritone below original — acoustic: middling foreground in cathedral;

Layer 4: half-speed, and thus an octave below original, and a tritone below Layer 3 — acoustic: middling foreground in cathedral.

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