Nature-Symphony 23
— A strange air from Beeny Cliff's sea caves

Opus 55 (2023) — Timing: 50'

derived from a field recording of a solo small bamboo wind chime plus one of regular deep rumbles from a Cornish sea cave

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Nature-symphonies — a transformational discovery (background notes)…

It was in 2012 that I tentatively started recording natural soundscapes, and within a few months got the idea of purchasing some high-grade precision-tuned wind chimes to record out in the wilds, hung up on tree branches. …

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… I quickly found that not only was the sound of each set of chimes individually beautiful and to some extent inspiring in quality when recorded out in the wild like that (mostly high-up in the Teign Gorge, Devon, UK), but also, almost all of the combinations of different chimes worked out beautifully musically, though naturally some combinations made a more 'challenging' listen than others.

Much more recently I tried making a half-speed version of part of each of the most appealing or otherwise 'promising' chimes ensemble recordings. They were each a revelation — immensely beautiful, with quite dramatic transformation of the original sound. That is, not just a matter of being slower and an octave lower, but the whole musical and emotional effect changed.

But then, in late August 2023 I got this little urge to do something really stupid (all the world's 'sheep' know I'm stupid anyway, so I thought I might as well do it anyway!), and try putting a particularly evocative chimes ensemble recording in a virtual cathedral, of all things, just to see how crazy it might sound.

I tried that with a particularly usable and effective reverb VST plugin called Orilriver, and was bowled over by the results. Shivers up spine, and plenty of goose-bumps for good measure! I then did listening spot tests using Orilriver in preview mode on a wide selection of my half-speed chimes recordings, and every one was incredibly, amazingly, transformed.

It was clear that I'd sort-of unwittingly stumbled into producing powerfully beautiful stochastic / probability-driven music works that have a lot in common with the ethos and methods of Iannis Xenakis, but with a big practical difference. Whereas typically he worked out probabilistic structures and processes to shape many of his works, this lunatic composer instead left that task to 'Mother Nature', then transforming those sounds in a way that Xenakis did in most of his electroacoustic works, to enhance their ability to excite the listener's own inner creativity and to generate profound and powerful experiences in the process.

It can be no surprise, then, that in these new works of mine there would be passing (albeit partial) resemblances to certain Xenakis works — Bohor comes particularly to mind, and even, in a funny way, some aspects of Terretektorh.

It was then a real no-brainer to recognise each such piece of mine as one of my numbered public music compositions. For the purpose of a liberating simplicity I chose to classify ALL of this type of work that I produce as what I'm calling nature-symphonies. That hyphen is important, because they are not just symphonies about nature, but are a very specific type of composition — nature-generated symphonies.

The term 'symphony', although closely guarded with a very restricted meaning by small-minded traditionalists, actually just means 'sounding together', which apparently was its original meaning. For me to want to use that term, there need to be at least two contrasting elements that are in some way combined or worked together in some way that is much more effective and deeply inspiring than the sum of those elements.

Although, in terms of my own nature-symphonies, that would mean ensembles rather than solo chimes sets, I've found that certain of my recordings using just one chimes set still produce effective and powerful nature-symphonies because of some element of the natural soundscape within which the chimes were sounding. A weir or waterfall, for example, or the wind itself, or a liberal amount of bird sound (much of which latter sounds remarkably musical at half-speed).

As for title for each work, they won't all necessarily have a title beyond Nature-Symphony [nn]. I'll add an imaginative title only where the finished piece suggests one to me. — Well, er, except that I do have one title earnestly looking for a work for it to be applied to, but currently I don't see how it could fit any extant or future transformed wind chimes works of mine! Not telling why!

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Basic details

Original recording for Layer 1–3 — *This chime being recorded earlier in the same session. The original for this work was made a little higher up and facing uphill to minimize background sound from the river Teign far below.*

Original recording for Layer 4 — View from just beside the recorder while the original cave rumbles recording for this work was running. There appears to be at least one other cave entrance in this alcove, running into the cliff at roughly right-angle to the one we're looking into. Very likely they're just different entrances to a really large cave further into the cliff, and hence the very low pitch of the rumbles and booms, some of which are too low to be heard at all by humans.

Instrumentation — Part of field recording of solo small Indonesian bamboo wind chime (longest tube 30cm), used as 3 layers, and part of field recording of regular very deep rumbles from a sea cave — the latter used as a quiet backdrop.
Original field recording location / date:
- Chime recording: 13 December 2023, on Piddledown, just in the top of the open woodland high up on north side of Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, just a little above the Hunter's Path.
- Cave rumbles recording: 3 September 2014, just a little down south side of main alcove of Beeny Cliff, near Boscastle, Cornwall, UK.
Processing — The layers were processed as follows:
- Layer 1 (chime): Half-speed; pitch an octave below original;
- Layer 2 (chime): Half-speed; pitch an octave plus a tritone below original;
- Layer 3 (chime): 17.678% speed; pitch two octaves plus a tritone below original;
  Layers 1-3 all given back-of-cathedral acoustic.
- Layer 4 (cave rumbles): Just a shelf-filter EQ to de-emphasize all non-bass frequencies; otherwise no processing.
I give some more specifics about the chime used, and the subsequent processing, on my Freesound page for the work.
Distinguishing features — I was really struck by the musical potential of this little chime, for its six tubes managed to sound a diminished triad, a second-inversion minor chord, a tritone and a minor sixth (its total range). Indeed really it has only five different notes because two of its tubes are roughly the same pitch. My choice of overall pitch for each layer resulted in a strengthening of tritone in the mix, and in a proliferation of intervals and chords that are heard, all with a musical piquancy that haunts the air.

The slow-breathing-like cave rumbles continue in the background throughout the work, being fully exposed for about a minute at either end.

The overall effect of the interactions of the chime activity on the different layers strongly reminds me of two particular things:

The ripplings and minor to not-so-minor impacts of the sea in various clefts in and around the entrance of Beeny Cliff's southernmost cave, which have a beautiful reverberance with a somewhat dark and menacing 'edge'.
The bird song impersonations in certain of Olivier Messiaen's organ compositions (e.g. Livre d’Orgue), when heard played in a very large church or cathedral.

Nature-Symphony 23— A strange air from Beeny Cliff's sea caves

Basic details

Nature-Symphony 23
— A strange air from Beeny Cliff's sea caves