Nightingale Quartet (Original Music)
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This bird quartet was made from recordings of one nightingale duplicated, pitch altered, mixed back onto itself and a “reverb” effect added.
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(Download mp3 file, 412K) I release this free under Creative Commons Share-alike Attrib 2.0. That means you can copy and use it for any purpose guilt-free, but I’d like credit (though I don’t demand it) in any reproductions/alterations. I made this with a demo for a Cakewalk (or any other audio/music application) plugin I’ve been playing with – an exceedingly cool plugin that does simply miraculous pitch corrections and outright changes. It’s called Melodyne. This version of the plugin (1) doesn’t do what this jaw-dropping video at YouTube demonstrates (a future version (2) of the plugin will) – picking notes out of a chord from a wave recording! – but, like I said, it does its own miraculous things. Fortunately, the plugin demo has very little limitations and allowed me to put together this music. There are odd artifacts from – I think – other very quiet background birds in the recordings that somehow got mixed into the pitch-bending, and who get their volume increased four times for the quartet. I best have done a bypass filter and/or noise cleanup to remove them first, but I didn’t notice them at first and now it’s too late. Or if that isn’t other background birds, there are warbling overtones in choirs of nightingales that emerge when they sing in the Western-style musical scale and classical tradition, which we wouldn’t know about, because we’ve never heard nightingales singing that way. (Just imagine what you can do when any pitched sound can be made a dynamic musical instrument. My imagination is running wild). I also have yet to figure out how to make the plugin alter the timing and length of notes – I could give this more variation and difference in the rhythm of harmonies.
