Transformed wind chimes: Nature-Symphony 37

Nature-Symphony 37 (Colourful resonance of a wild sea on rocks and cliff) — Unusually for my creations, this one has an almost erotic quality. Here we have a quite chunky vigorous Atlantic swell breaking on rocks and low cliff, but processed to sound somewhat further away, so the sound has a smoothness and gentleness about it and its high dramatics — just as if I were recording from a little higher up the steep grassy slope. From around there such sea action gives a varying but continuous thundering broadly centred around 60–70Hz, which always sounds somehow meaningful to me, as though it were pointing to some sort of more hospitable past that I were longing to reconnect with.

On top of that seascape we have the foreground sound of a separately recorded musically potent small bamboo wind chime, used here in four layers, each separated from its neighbours by pitch difference of a tritone. The top two bamboo layers were actually taken unchanged from Nature-Symphony 36, at the end of which, as the metal chimes fade out, for a few seconds the little bamboo chime exposes itself nicely.

From each layer independently the chime is emphasizing the tritone, so the overall effect is decidedly tritone-rich. In addition the minor third and diminished triad are much emphasized. To me the effect combined with the sea sound give the fanciful impression of some universal unrequited eroticism.

The original field recording of the sea is at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/684588/, and a somewhat more distant-sounding version of it at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/684590/ . I used the latter as my starting point, making it a bit more distant still.

Layer content:

Layers 1–4: Indonesian ornamented bamboo wind chime, small (longest tube c. 30cm) (5 tubes only; intervals in descending order: whole tone, semitone, minor third, whole tone).

Layer 5: The sea recording

I made the sea recording for this work on 15 April 2023, on the grassy slope of Mussel Point, near Zennor, Penwith, Cornwall, UK. The small bamboo chime recording dates from 11 December 2023, on Piddledown, slightly below the Hunter's Path, high up on north side of Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. Geolocation is given for the sea recording.

Advisory
To get the best out of this, with its mass of detail, listen with high-grade headphones. The latter should also be the answer if the boomy thundering sound of the sea is too strong from your speakers (room and speaker resonances would readily make that unpleasantly strong).

Making this sea recording. Unusually, I chose to adjust this photo to give maximum detail in the white on the sea, which means accepting everything else usually being underexposed.

Yes, that is the recorder on its tripod, just below the decrepit barbed-wire fence.

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 — which is why it isn't the usual six tubes.

Techie stuff:

For both recordings the recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields, on a Sirui carbon fibre tripod (sea) and shorter Aoka Mini carbon fibre 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 also applied background and mic wind noise reduction.

Deployment of layers is as follows:

Layers 1–4: top is a tritone below original, then each successive layer is a tritone lower than the last. However, Layer 4 is same speed as L3, with pitch further reduced to gain the tritone difference. Acoustic for all these: middling foreground in cathedral.

Layer 5 (sea): no processing apart from making the sea sound rather less close and wild than it actually was, to balance with the chime.

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