Flies as musicians (4) — Nature-Symphony 69 (remake)

(Remake, with greater clarity, and small musical enhancement)
Nature-Symphony 69 (Flies as musicians 4: Diminished seventh, expanded!), which I'm also calling Rannoch Moor Moods, 2. — This is a 13-layer rendition of half of https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/751156/ . It contains grasshoppers (sadly largely obliterated in this remake) and some linnet contact calls as well as the flies and bumblebees. It's part of a short series of Nature-Symphonies using the sound of flies treated musically. I originally made this one with just a diminished seventh chord with a tritone added to the bottom to increase the brooding quality of its effect. But then as I reviewed it I was intuited to add a semitone, and then a minor third, on top of that chord — the latter two pitches then being transposed an octave higher to have proper effect. So, what we have is not just a diminished seventh chord but an expansion of it that has a complex, intrinsically dramatic sound — not just sombre and brooding as the diminished seventh chord would be on its own.

This improved version has further noise-reduction (which, unfortunately, obliterated almost all grasshopper sound!), and additional layers to make it sound clearer and altogether more musical, and the final note of the motif is now nicely dissonant in a potently musical way.

The Rannoch Moor connection is via music that haunted and pursued me many years ago, yes, out on Rannoch Moor (Scottish Highlands, UK), on my single-day solo mega-walks (some 25 miles) from Corrour station to Ben Alder for an early summit lunch stop and then the long and challenging walk down and across much rough boggy moorland to Rannoch station in very good time for the evening train back to Fort William. Some of that music, and the half-diminished seventh in particular, forms a compelling knobbly backbone for my Symphony 4 (https://www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk/sym4.htm ), while the more brooding diminished seventh dominates in that work's final movement, and indeed briefly expands into something like the expanded chord used here, in a passage of intense tension and drama as the implied frantic search for something that can never be found heads into its fiery crux.

The fly sound 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 and bees coming from different directions, and (especially bumblebees) sometimes circling close around the recorder. Here and there we get little flurries of linnet contact calls.

Unsatisfactory constraints on all the flies Nature-Symphonies are primarily that (a) the sequence of layer offset durations is fixed for the whole work, so every sound will repeat the same quasi-melodic / rhythmic pattern (no rhythmic variation apart from the flies' antics), and (b) such a large number of layers means a quite high sum total of background noise, even after my best endeavours at noise-reduction.

I made the original recording in very warm and humid weather during a very extended lunch stop on 17 July 2024 on the top of Cranbrook Down (Cranbrook Castle, an ancient hill fort), high above the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK.

Advisory

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

A 4-days-later mockup of this 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, set at a low height to reduce wind disturbance.

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

Layer pitch shifts (semitones above / below original): +4, +1, 0, -3, -6, -9, -12, -18, -12, +13, +16, +13, -7. Note that the layer offsets and pitches don't fully correspond with the numerical order of the layers.

Layer acoustics: Layers 10–12 moderate back of cathedral; the rest middling foreground in cathedral.

Note that in this and the other flies Nature-Symphonies uploaded here so far I've not changed speed of any layers; only pitch has been changed. changed (using kHs Pitch Shifter) — though they are slowed a bit in some remakes to follow this one.

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