Original music works and natural sounds
to support self-actualization

Music for expanding horizons and connecting with Nature…

My works generally are in different ways supportive of self-actualization / self-realization, even though certain of them have particular issues that one really does need to be aware of for healthiest listening — as explained in the respective programme notes for the works. You can browse through my entire oeuvre on my music site.

Some points worth bearing in mind…

• The recordings of my formally composed music works are all of MIDI simulations of performances, created on my computer. These are much more like real performances than the average MIDI realizations, because of the work I put into them in choosing and tailoring particular instrument sounds and shaping the volume of notes and phrases and, to a certain extent tempo, to impart a natural expressiveness to the music. I set out to give each recording a 'natural'-sounding ambiance / reverb that I felt to be appropriate to the type of work / performance.

  However, there were constraints — particularly that of available memory for holding sound samples during playback / recording, which meant that I had to settle for quite an unsatisfactory sound quality for the sections of string instruments and also the choir sections — each of which had to be reduced to mono within each section and thus was condemned to having something of a 'synth pad' quality. Also, the choir sings only 'Ahh', so you need to refer to the programme notes for the particular works in order to know what the choir is singing.

  However, all my works are strong enough to come across really effectively without regard to those limitations. People who dismiss the recordings because, for example, I can't get on with that choir sound are doing themselves a great disservice through their attachment to hearing things exactly the way they're used to hearing them — and also they demonstrate that they aren't able / willing to pay proper attention to the music itself, so that instead they pay exaggerated attention to subsidiary, non-musical issues, and judge the music on the basis of such non-musical issues.

• Some of the works were composed with a sort of 'spirituality' subtext, using 'sacred' mantras sung by the choir — because at that time I had no idea that 'spirituality' was actually highly problematical, being a harmful sidetrack to keep people diverted away from genuine self-actualization. I caution that, for healthy listening, such subtexts need to be completely disregarded, and the mantras to be seen simply as convenient musical building blocks, using vocal lines that don't have meaningful text. The one easily recognised subtext that goes through all the music and is healthy and life enhancing to pay attention to is that of the music reflecting aspects of nature and wild places.

• In most of the works, in places very significant use is made of particular instrument sounds containing very low ('earthquaky') frequencies. For this reason, if you listen with ordinary computer speakers or indeed even ordinary 'Hi-Fi' equipment, you will at least to some extent miss an important component of a number of the works. Such instrumental sounds include quiet strokes on the bass drum with a soft-headed stick, held 'pedal' low notes on the double basses, and low notes on a 16- or indeed 32-foot stop on the organ. For example, the effectiveness of the opening and ending of Music From the Mountain Waters depends on your hearing the deep, almost 'earthquaky', sound of the quiet bass drum strokes there.

• In this music, as with all music, I caution against making a general practice of listening to it with earphones / headphones, because that's an unhealthy, ungrounding thing to do.

• You can read the programme notes that I've written for each work on the one-time CDs by clicking on its title in the listing in my Music Digital Download Store. From there you can also listen to an MP3 file of the work presented as a video on YouTube — so you can 'try out' the music before deciding whether to order a CD-quality download of the respective album.

• Please note that my unpublished works are unpublished NOT because my publisher has rejected them but simply because my time priorities changed and I was no longer in a position to devote the necessary huge amount of time and personal involvement to the creation of scores from the MIDI file format in which each of the unpublished works exists. To the best of my knowledge my publisher would like to take them on too, but that would depend on my creating scores of them — and, as I've implied, that's not the simple and relatively quick process that many people imagine.
  

  Even heavyweight score-writing programs like Sibelius can't automatically produce a usable working score from MIDI files of any music that isn't really simple, and indeed Sibelius made a fair degree of pig's ear of each work in MIDI format that I loaded into it, so that I then had a prolonged and painstaking task of correcting all the errors before I could even start adding in all the necessary markings to enable a proper performance to be executed from the finished score. At least you can still listen to my recordings of MIDI renderings of them.

All my main ('opus number') compositions, both published and unpublished, are now available as CD-quality digital downloads, and are available from my Music Digital Download Store.

Natural Soundscapes and Nature-Symphonies

CD-quality sound recordings of nature — particularly natural ambient soundscapes. These can be accessed on Freesound. These are the healthier alternative to listening to lots and lots of music as so many people do these days.

Wind Chimes In the Wild —
Symphonies of Wind Chimes and Nature

Within my overall natural soundscapes programme is my Wind Chimes In the Wild project (started November 2012), in which I am, bit by bit, building up a collection of significant-length recordings of various sets of quality wind chimes in wild, reasonably natural surroundings, all recorded fully authentically, with no overdubbing, nor looping, nor having anything moving the chimes other than the wind you can hear (in considerable contrast to all the commercially produced recordings of wind chimes that I've heard, which all have at least some type of faking).

Commercial wind chimes recordings are typically made to be as bland and soporific as possible, but my recordings are much more engaging and healthy, conveying the friskiness of the wind, with the chimes themselves tending to friskiness at times. Also, depending on the recording, some degree of wind noise in the microphones is often part of the soundscape, just as you normally get some wind noise in your ears when you're out in the wind. These recordings, thus, are best thought of not as just wind chimes recordings, but as recordings of wild natural soundscapes including wind chimes.

In my natural soundscapes Digital Download Catalogue I list my range of recordings of 'pure' natural soundscapes plus ones in the Wind Chimes in the Wild series, with links to their respective Freesound pages, where you can listen to them or download them.

New, from August 2023 — Nature-Symphonies

The most potent music ever for enhancing mental and brain function

These are apparently a totally new type of music (allegedly not just here on Earth, but for all human-type civilizations through the whole of 'Existence' so far), which are a parallel to many works of Iannis Xenakis, in being stochastic (probability-driven) music. They differ from his work in that I don't generate the stochastic structures / processes, but let good old 'Mother Nature' do it for me! I just process and deploy the respective field recordings in ways that I intuit could be musically effective.

This is where my musical creativity has been able to 'go crazy'! It proved not just possible but remarkably easy for me to process various of the wind chimes recordings (and a few 'straight' natural soundscapes) to produce complex, intense and visionary major music creations, through slowing the respective recordings to various extents, and often doing additional pitch-shifting, and deploying such processed copies of the respective recording(s) in concurrent 'layers' to produce all sorts of 'out-of-this-world' musical and dramatic effects.

Listen to the Nature-Symphonies on YouTube