Nature-Symphony 84
— Wistful humming song from the Earth

Opus 118 (2026) — Timing: 58'

generated from Nature-Symphony Ambience 1 (Fantasy — Cranbrook Down's musical bees) plus a solo small bamboo wind chime in two layers

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

Recording session for the flies / bees / birds component — Recording session for the bees / flies / birds component

Recording session for small bamboo chime — Recording session for the bees / flies / birds component

Instrumentation —

Bees and bumblebees, with flies and birds,
Small Indonesian bamboo wind chime, 5 tubes.

Original field recording locations / dates:

The bees / flies birds recording: The Cranbrook Castle ancient hill-fort on Cranbrook Down, above Fingle Bridge, Teign Gorge, Drewsteignton, Devon, UK, 29 June 2025;
Bamboo chime recorded on Piddledown (sic), close to Hunter's Path, high up on north side of Teign Gorge, 13November 2023.

Processing and deployment:
- Layer 1: the bees / flies / birds recording already processed in Nature-Symphony Ambience 1 (Fantasy — Cranbrook Down's musical bees) (part 1 of 2), which is used here unchanged, in just one layer;
- Layers 2+3: the small bamboo chime: in two layers as follows:
  
  Layer 2+3: both half-speed, with thus shared 1-octave pitch reduction. Further pitch reduction: L2: major 3rd (total reduction 1 octave plus major 3rd); L3: 2 octaves (total reduction 3 octaves)
  
  Layer 2 starts at just under 2 minutes in, and Layer 3 at 3¾ minutes.
For full details see the Freesound page for this work.
Distinguishing features:
This is a different approach to ‘flies as musicians’ that had figured in some earlier Nature-Symphonies. There, by using a fair number of layers, melodic motifs were created by the spacing of time offsets between different layers. Here no attempt was made to do that, but the musical intervals between layers were chosen to ensure maximum musical potency. The addition of the bamboo chimes to the bees / flies tones, and their particular pitch adjustments, was intended to give more structural and harmonic ‘anchoring’ for the our winged friends, giving more sense of ‘meaning’ to their tones and intervals; this appears to have worked just as intended.

The effect is hauntingly wispy, with ‘tension’ intervals being frequent, and in the rare instance where a recognisable melodic motif appears, that was never contrived by me — even the surprise moment somewhere in the middle where three close flies in succession rather startlingly declaim what sounds to be the descending three-note opening motif of Rachmaninov's piano Prelude in C# Minor.

Note that much of the ongoing background sound is not just ‘noise’ but more distant hubbub of actual bees and flies. That gives a colourful, musical element to that background, for those who tune into it and don't just keep focused on the foreground

Nature-Symphony 84 — Wistful humming song from the Earth

Basic details

Nature-Symphony 84
— Wistful humming song from the Earth