Transformed wind chimes: Nature-Symphony 80

Nature-Symphony 80 (What the unseen fiery sun is trying to tell us) — This arose from a serendipitous find while going through all my Freesound upload pages to ensure correct categorization of each. More than half of them had been automatically allocated more or less wrong categories when the categorization system was brought in. I came to Half-speed! Gypsy and bamboo wind chimes in Teign Gorge, early spring, and did a quick listen to a snatch of it, and was immediately struck by its potentiality to produce something new, intense and visionary through a bit of multilayering — and within a few hours I had this uncompromising but to me really compelling work completed.

Through the multilayering I got effectively a wholetone scale basis for the overall work, but the individual layers each still have the Gypsy scale of the metal chimes, while those layers are separated by musically potent intervals, at widely different pitches, so we never clearly recognise the Gypsy scale and its melancholy sound, but rather hear a more fiery and inspirational sort of sound, with all sorts of tonal, or, shall we say, modal, centres coming to light like solar flares, then getting absorbed and reshaped into other colours, other harmonic gestures. Again and again a system resonance emphasizes one particular beacon-like tone, which has an empowering, dynamo-like effect, reminiscent of the persistent high D in the third movement of my Symphony 6, where likewise it seems to have a transcendent empowering effect, leading the whole show.

To those who can't make head or tail of this (or other Nature-Symphonies of mine), my counsel is not to try to 'understand' it, but allow it to create within your own imagination your own unique imagery and narrative(s). That's the way it and all the most deeply inspired art works, if only people would allow it to!

Chimes used

(All four layers)
** Music of the Spheres Gypsy chimes, soprano+mezzo — 6 tubes each, tuned to different modes on an Eastern European Gypsy scale. When I put them together I regard them as a single instrument.

** Indonesian bamboo chimes, large and small

I made the original recording on 5 March 2013, beside the Hunter's Path, Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, high up on the north side of the valley.

Advisory

To get the best out of this, with its mass of detail, listen with high-grade headphones.
Caution: It would be best NOT to turn the volume up beyond a sensible normal level, because of the fatiguing effect that would come from that frequently sustained 'beacon' tone.

This recording taking place. The large and small bamboo chimes are the leftmost, closest to the recorder, and the Gypsy chimes are further from the latter because of their loud and penetrating tone. The soprano Gypsy chime is a bit difficult to recognise here because of a broken-off birch trunk immediately behind it.

Techie stuff

The recorder was Sony PCM-M10, with Røde DeadKitten furry windshield (original, more effective, version), placed on a Velbon Mini tripod. I soon stopped using the latter because of its weight and the malevolent sprung clip type of leg-length locks, which tended to bite my fingers painfully and quite readily drew blood or at least gave me blood blisters.

Post-recording processing was to apply EQ in Audacity to correct for the muffling effect of the windshield, and more recent processing with the A1 Stereo Control VST plugin (160% widening). I used the 'Change speed' effect in Audacity to produce the half-speed version, which formed the basis for this work, with further processing as follows…

Layer pitch shifts (total interval below original recording): L1: octave, L2: 2 octaves + major 3rd, L3: 2 octaves + tritone, L4: 2 octaves +minor 7th.
To translate that into intervals between the layers, L1–L2: octave + major third, L2–L3: an octave + tritone, L3–L4: octave + minor 7th. — In other words all the makings for a seething 'universe' of colourful 'tension' intervals and chords.
Acoustic: L1+L2: back of cathedral, L3+L4: moderate back of cathedral.

Getting the long reverberation following the rapid fade-out at the end was the one tricky thing to achieve, but clearly I succeeded. That long decay time would have killed the work if applied to more than just the last second or so before the rapid fade-out, and I could achieve that only by a tricky workaround involving splitting-off the final few seconds and putting those in another set of four tracks, carefully aligned, which could then be given the very long reverb. Key to success was NOT to delete the extra length initially, but merely to silence it — doing the deletion only when I'd established where the reverb had finally become inaudible, and then to delete all from that point to the end. — If that makes sense! :-)

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