UK Registered Charity Number: 1154107

Conservation by Re-use

Helping churches acquire surplus and/or redundant bells to be hung for

English-style full-circle bell-ringing.

Sound of Bells – Tonal Analysis Report continued

From the tonal analysis report we can deduce :

The individual bells consist of seven pre-Simpson tuned bells and an almost Simpson tuned bell (6th). The hums are high and the primes are mainly low - which are typical of pre-Simpson bells.

The Nominal partial errors range from 22 cents flat (7th) to 17 cents sharp (treble). We can also see that there is only 74 cents between the 5th & 6th  bells instead of a semitone - not particularly tuneful!. We can see that many adjacent bells have similar frequencies, for example the 6th & 7th bells Primes are very close; likewise for 2nd & 3rd bells Hum; the 4th & 5th bells hum.

The overall effect is a poor sounding ring of bells. The first graph (next page) shows the tonal analysis before re-tuning. The Y-axis is the relative error in cents of the five main partials taken from the table on the previous page. If the ring of bells were perfectly tuned to the Simpson principle, the graph would consist of five flat and parallel lines at the Y-axis error of 0 cents. The graph colours correspond to the colour coding shown in the table.

The main problem with this ring is that it contains bells with totally different tonal characteristics cast by  three different founders over a period of about two centuries. For bells rung in the traditional English-style, errors in the Hum, Prime, Tierce and Quint are less noticeable than the apparently small errors in the Nominal partial.