Transformed wind chimes: Nature-Symphony 22

Nature-Symphony 22 (Solar rays — The Sun's 'Poem of Ecstasy') — A massively profound and inspiring piece for those who can open to it. My first audition of this quite shook me, at the end eliciting from me a shaky and tearful 'Wow!'.

For most potentially amenable people a second listening would be needed before they could at least properly attune to it. Even I started my first listening still in considerable doubt about it, so do please take heart and give it at least a second try if it doesn't register first time. I never imagined that such a powerful piece could be so simply created from the particular chime's remarkably gentle and unassuming musicality — though the harmonics-rich steely timbre of Davis Blanchard chimes always has promise, and I was aware of nice musical effects from its one 'blue' note that provided some gentle dissonance.

The work's drama is not in obvious physical dramatics, nor rhythm, but in constant immensely meaningful harmonic shifts, usually against two main sustained tones, one an octave plus a fourth below the other. A half-diminished seventh chord is generally lurking around, based on the lower sustained tone, sometimes coming more out in the open, but much of the time it's more or less camouflaged by so many other intensely meaningful harmonic shifts and unorthodox 'cadences' that resolve one tension only to land the listener in a different one. The half-diminished seventh is a chord that really makes its mark in my Symphony 4 (https://www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk/sym4.htm ).

The original field recording for both layers is https://freesound.org/people/Philip_Goddard/sounds/686909/

For detailed information about the Davis Blanchard chimes, please see https://www.philipgoddard.com/shop/store-2-windchimes.htm, just scrolling down a little.

Chime used (for both layers):

(solo metal chime): Davis Blanchard The Blues (tuned to a a gentle Blues scale)

I made the original recording for this work on 16 February 2017, on the rough slope just below Hunting Gate, which latter marks the highest point of the Hunter's Path, high up on the north side of the Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK.

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

Note that many speaker systems — particularly lower-grade ones — have 'peaky' over-bright treble, and through any of those, parts of this work would sound abrasive and horrible to listen to!

Making the recording following the original one for this work. The 'The Blues' chime looked identical to the Pluto chime in this photo, and of course for this recording there were no bamboo chimes.

Techie stuff:

The recorder was a Sony PCM-D100, with two nested furry windshields, on a Zipshot Mini tripod.

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

To create this Nature-Symphony I made two copies of the first (most active and loud) half of the original recording, to be used as layers in Audacity, and processed them as follows:

Layer 1: reduced speed to achieve pitch of an octave below original — acoustic: back of cathedral

Layer 2: reduced speed to achieve an octave plus a fourth below original — acoustic: back of cathedral

For both layers, immediately following the speed reduction I also used my Extreme wind-cut preset in TDR-Nova GE to greatly minimize microphone wind noise, and used Voxengo CurveEQ to tame the over-loud sustained tone (different in the two layers, most invasive in the top layer — though I deliberately didn't reduce it further).

I aligned the two layers so that they start playing simultaneously, but because of the slower speed of Layer 2, this gets increasingly out of step with Layer 1. I cut off the excess length of Layer 2, but not before cutting out a small quiet section of the latter almost at the end, to draw in a small rise in its activity (leading on from a similar small activity rise in Layer 1) to round off the ending.

Finally, the reason for replacing the original upload of this work was that at last I twigged as to most likely why so much of the sound was distorted: settings in the OrilRiver VST plugin that add 'modulation' (a controlled distortion) to the reverb. I tried zeroing the two knobs relating to modulation, and got this much clearer rendering. I'll amend my presets there so this shouldn't happen again.

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