Transformed wind chimes & natural soundscape: Nature-Symphony 46

Nature-Symphony 46 (Peaceful sea at night with "What the hell's that?") — A real weird one here from Bogeyman Phil! Here the chimes are relegated to dreamy atmosphere-painting — a backdrop for a horde of at least one of our most scary-sounding species of seabird, often called 'the devil bird'. — Bafflingly bizarre, with echoes for 'sensitive' people of tormented spirits, tortured children, demons, sorcery — whatever!

I use here part of the Manx shearwaters recording that you can hear at https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/688774/, after some careful reduction of the sea sound so that I could significantly amplify the little sweeties from sounding distant far down below to quite close perspective. Doing that revealed quite a lot more of the birds than one readily hears in the original, and a second layer from that recording much increases the number of Manxies for the listener's bedevilment.

Chime used:

(layers 1+2)
Davis Blanchard Pluto (solo) (8 tubes, tuned to an ethereal-sounding minor scale but incorporating a minor major seventh chord, spread through the two octaves, which embraces both minor triad and augmented triad, and gives it a teasing, mysterious dissonant aspect). The big pitch reduction has much transformed the chime's sound to dark and brooding mysterious.

The Manx shearwaters are also in two layers.

I made the original chime recording on 16 February 2017, on rough steep ground just below Hunting Gate, highest point on the Hunter's Path, Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK. Original recording not on Freesound. The Manx shearwaters recording was in early small hours, 25 June 2014, from the top of the north side of the mouth of the Cot Valley, near Cape Cornwall, St Just, Penwith, Cornwall, UK. Geolocation is for the Manx shearwaters.

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

Early sunrise time, the 'Manxies' having long packed-up their performance till another night. You can still just see the recorder in position on a tiny tripod on the spoil tip on right, just touching the sea horizon.

Recording two Davis Blanchard chimes plus a large and small cheap bamboo chime in a later session. The arrow points to the recorder, with its black furry windshield.

Techie stuff:

Recorder for the chime was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields — the inner being a Movo one of rectangular box shape*, and the outer a custom Windcut one —, and it was placed on a Zipshot Mini tripod.

*Note that I WARN AGAINST use of windshields that are of any sort of box shape, for I soon found that they were inherently unsuitable for any decent-quality recording. While no doubt non-box-shaped windshields from Movo would be okay, the presence of relatively flat surfaces, edges and corners creates internal narrow resonance peaks in the treble, which give the latter an abrasive and rather 'screamy' quality, no matter who's made the particular windshields.  When I realized why my recordings had developed that nasty treble quality I had to go back through all recordings made with that dratted box-shaped windshield, and use Voxengo CurveEQ to enable me to precisely neutralize two narrow treble peaks and thus enable the recordings to sound wonderfully natural rather than bafflingly stressful.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshields.

Layer 1: half-speed, giving an octave pitch reduction, with further pitch reduction to a total of 2 octaves below original; acoustic: moderate back of cathedral;

Layer 2: Speed to give pitch reduction of an octave plus tritone below original, with a further pitch reduction of an octave; acoustic: back cathedral.

Recorder for the Manx shearwaters was Sony PCM-M10 with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield, on a Hama Mini tripod, which is not just 'mini' but tiny.

Post-recording processing: as for the chime, except that A1 Stereo Control was used to widen the soundstage (200%) to sharpen the atrocious stereo imaging and provide a modest zoom-in. In fact I established much more recently that I'd have got an optimal stereo image by widening the recording just 160%; I'd redo that if only I had the time.

I used Bertom Denoiser Pro to reduce the sea sound to make significant amplification of the distant birds workable.

Layer 3: no change beyond the above processing.

Layer 4: speed reduction to give pitch a major third below original; acoustic: a slight cathedral reverb.

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