The Sound Of Bells – Archive Material 2004
December 8, 2008

Broadcast Friday 2nd January 2004 on Radio 2GB’s “Brian Wilshire Programme” at 9pm

Church bells are one of the distinctive sounds of Christmas and other parts of the year. It is interesting to see how Australians are pioneering the improvement in the sound of bells.

The New Scientist magazine has an article by Philip Ball on this subject: “Mingle Bells”. Bells are rarely used in orchestral compositions because they produce a complex sound that jars with other musical instruments. Bells may “jingle” – but they don’t necessarily “mingle” with other instruments.

When you listen to a church bell ring, you will notice that as the initial sound fades away, you will hear a second, higher note humming in the air. This is the delightful overtone that gives European-style bells their distinctive sound. This is the scientific explanation for the pleasant sound with which we are all so familiar.

Unfortunately, this overtone also clashes with other musical instruments when it is used to create part of a chord or a harmony. Therefore, when composers want to create the sound of a “bell”, they use other instruments to mimic the sound without the overtone and so they do not actually use a bell.

Philip Ball’s article sets out some of the work done by Europeans over the centuries to change the design of bells to enable composers to incorporate them into orchestral pieces.

The 17th century musician Jacob van Eyck played an instrument called the carillon, which is a series of bells operated from a keyboard. (One of Australia’s most famous examples of a carillon is at Sydney University, the player of which has been Dr Reg Walker, the brother of the former Superintendent of this Mission the late Sir Alan Walker). Van Eyck teamed up with two bell founders and produced the best-sounding carillon then developed. But they did not write down how they did it, and so when they died their expertise was lost to the world.

Canon Arthur Simpson in England in 1895 reopened the discussion over how to improve the sound of church bells and used his church bells in Sussex to experiment. The basic issue of the overtone is the complex way in which bells vibrate. He set about trying to measure and compare the vibrations. He came up with some new ways of making church bells. But it was still rather haphazard. Some people (like Eyck and his colleagues) could make the improvements intuitively – but they could not explain just how they did it and could not advise others on what should be done.

But now we have come to the era of computers and other scientific developments. It is now possible to do much better research into the mechanics of sound, overtone and vibrations.

A number of Australians are world leaders in understanding how the sounds of bells take place and how they can be improved. The Victorian-based company Australian Bell is making the most of all these scientific developments to improve bell sounds. One of its recent projects was to make a proposal for a commemorative bell installation at the site of the World Trade Centre in New York.

Now bells can take their place in the orchestra pit, bringing new life to old works and providing a new range of sounds for composers to conjure with.