Flies as musicians (1) — Nature-Symphony 66

Nature-Symphony 66 (Flies as musicians (1): wholetone scale (implicit)) — This is an 8-layer rendition of https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/750511/ , which has a lot of delightful willow warbler song and very quiet grasshoppers as well as the flies. It's the first of a short series of Nature-Symphonies using the sound of flies treated musically.

This is not the continuous hum of mostly hoverflies that I've recorded before in the woods. Here we're out in the open on top of Cranbrook Down in warm to punishingly sweltery weather, high up to south of Fingle Bridge in the Teign Gorge, and with a far-reaching panorama around us. Here our aural attention is repeatedly drawn to the 'zing' of individual flies coming from different directions, passing by at speed, and sometimes circling close around the recorder —while also of course we sometimes hear a bee or bumblebee fussing around on the odd close-by flower. All the passing flies give a sense of a fiery energy, much like furiously fast tremolando orchestral strings.

The tuning of the layers is to the wholetone scale, BUT this is the 'implicit' version, in which the offset between neighbouring layers is long enough to dispel any direct audible impression of the layer tuning, so for the most part you don't hear the wholetone scale as such, but that still biases the various musical intervals and chords towards ones on the wholetone scale — and to my ears the effect is delightfully musical once one has let go of any hankering after a tune or indeed anything predictable. The musical 'ideas' are all implicit, there for the listener to create their own musical nuances and storylines. Just lie back in the grass and enjoy — and afterwards no doubt have some ticks to pick off yourself for your pleasurable indiscretion (it's tick country)! :-)

I did try an 'explicit' version of this (with the layers much more closely offset so that one repeatedly does hear recognisable wholetone scale and chords), but that didn't work well in this case, with the willow warbler 'verses' piled too much on top of each other, and the odd distant clonks of some farm machinery piled on top of each other and sounding plain ugly. However, another flies Nature-Symphony is soon to follow, with explicit wholetone sound.

I made the original recording on the morning of 31 July 2024 in sweltery weather, about a third of the way on the track from the Cranbrook byway (in the woods) up to the hilltop (Cranbrook Castle, an ancient hill fort).

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

The original recording taking place.

Techie stuff:

Recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested custom Windcut furry windshields. It was placed on a Sirui carbon-fibre tripod.
Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield.

Layer pitch reductions (semitones below original) — unchanged, -2, -4, -6, -8, -10, -14, -18;
Layer offsets: 30 seconds between neighbours, except that the quietly growling Layer 8 (bottom) starts first, followed by Layer 1 just 15 seconds later.
Layer acoustics — Layers 1-6 middling foreground in cathedral; layers 7+8 moderate back of cathedral.
Note that in this and all the other flies Nature-Symphonies I'm not reducing speed of any layers. Only pitch gets reduced (using kHs Pitch Shifter).

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