Music Compositions of Philip Goddard — www.philipgoddard-music.co.uk

Nature-Symphony 26
— Celebration of skylarks, wind and the unknown

Opus 58 (2023) — Timing: 61'
derived from a field recording of skylarks on remotest Dartmoor, plus another of a solo small bamboo chime


Listen on YouTube…

Basic details


Recording skylarks during this session
Recording skylarks during this session. Two recorders were running, and this was the other one. The recorder for this recording was sheltered by one of the peat scarps in centre-skyline.
A different recording of the large bamboo chime, made a week or so later near the same spot
Recording the large bamboo chime, after having made the recording used in this work. The view is the same, and that chime looked very similar but was smaller.

  • Instrumentation —  Part of field recording of trio of metal wind chimes, used as 2 layers, and part of one of a solo large bamboo chime (longest tube 50cm).

  • Original field recording location / date:

    • Skylarks: 6 May 2013, in immediate summit area of Cut Hill in the middle of the north section of Dartmoor, Devon, UK — reputedly the most remote spot in southern England.

    • Bamboo 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. 

  • Processing — The layers were processed as follows:

    • Layer 1 (skylarks): no change;
    • Layers 2–5 (skylarks): Speed reduced for each to reduce its pitch to a major third lower than the layer above; additionally, Layer 5 (only) given a moderate cathedral-type reverb.
    • Layer 6 (small bamboo wind chime, identified as 'small, wholetone'): half-speed, so an octave below original.
    • Layer 7 (ditto): speed reduced to give pitch an octave plus minor sixth below original.
    • Layer 8 (ditto): quarter-speed, and so two octaves below original.
    • Layers 6–8 each given an attenuated 'deep cave' reverb.

    I give some more specifics about the recordings, chime used, and the subsequent processing, on my Freesound page for the work.

  • Distinguishing features — The emphasis here is on a celebration of skylarks singing as heard in a wild place of remote solitude. Therefore processing of the sound has been kept to what doesn't materially take the listener away from that authentic wilderness solitude experience. For that reason, too, I chose part of the original chime recording that had rather sparse activity, so one's attention would still mostly be on the wilderness soundscape.

    Weirdly, the particular chime, which sounds notes on the whole-tone scale, isn't at all whole-tone in sound in the reduced-speed versions of the recording. It still works fine for this Nature-Symphony, but I suspect would have been better if it had retained its whole-tone sound for us here.

    Near the beginning the listener can hear evidence of a little creativity in my aligning the five skylark layers. A passing fly in Layer 1 is heard in each successive layer two to a few seconds later than in the layer above, of course each time at the correspondingly lower pitch. The major thirds and therefore augmented triads implicit in that differential between the skylark layers go unnoticed because their voices are constantly bubbling and varying their individual pitches, but that passing fly has a very definite pitch. I therefore cheekily contrived things so that the fly spells out the major thirds and thus augmented triads.

    Although we don't hear those intervals and chords in any obvious way in the skylark chorus, actually those pitch differences do impart a certain subtle colourfulness to their overall sound, even though it doesn't draw attention to itself.