Nature-Symphony 85
— Nature's ancient echoes on Cranbrook Castle

Opus 119 (2026) — Timing: 118'

generated from Nature-Symphony Ambience 2 (Seethingly peaceful horizons — Bees, flies, birds, grasshoppers) 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/ grasshoppers component — Recording session for the bees / flies / birds / grasshoppers component. Recorder is almost invisible in bracken shade, roughly at centre (its furry windshield is black, and so is the mini tripod)

Recording session for small bamboo chime — Recording session for the bees / flies / birds / grasshoppers component. Recorder is almost invisible in bracken shade, roughly at centre (its furry windshield is black, and so is the mini tripod)

Instrumentation —

Bees, bumblebees, flies, grasshoppers and birds,
Small Indonesian bamboo wind chime, 6 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, 18 June 2025;
Bamboo chime recorded on Piddledown (sic), close to Hunter's Path, high up on north side of Teign Gorge, 13November 2023 (not the same as that used in Nature-Symphony 84, though it looks very similar).

Processing and deployment:
- Layer 1: a bit under two-thirds of the bees / flies / grasshoppers / birds recording already processed in Nature-Symphony Ambience 2 (Seethingly peaceful horizons — Bees, flies, birds, grasshoppers), which is used here unchanged, in just one layer;
- Layers 2+3: the small bamboo chime: in two layers as follows:
  
  Both layers speed-reduced to give 1½ octave (an octave plus tritone) pitch reduction, then upper layer pitch-shifted up a tritone to give net reduction of one octave, while lower layer was pitch-shifted down a minor third, giving net reduction of an octave plus minor seventh — so the layers are a minor 7th apart. Layer 2 comes in just past 3 minutes in, Layer 3 offset by a further c. 8½ seconds.
For full details see the Freesound page for this work.
Distinguishing features:
This builds on the experiment of Nature-Symphony 84, using a busier and more varied (and longer!) soundscape recorded little more than a week earlier (sounding all the more busy owing to my having deployed that recording in three layers for this work), when it was sunny and the grasshoppers were sounding-off nicely.

Also, here, not only do we have a great performance from the grasshoppers, but we get some lovely moments with skylarks (always pretty distant) and linnets — the latter being very 'flitty' and moving around a lot, but on a couple of occasions one perching close to sing some fragments a bit too loud and shrill for comfort before launching-off for a more distant perch,

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

Nature-Symphony 85 — Nature's ancient echoes on Cranbrook Castle

Basic details

Nature-Symphony 85
— Nature's ancient echoes on Cranbrook Castle