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.

Waveanal can give a frequency domain display (see above) and a tabular list of detected partials with relative amplitudes (see next page).

For more information about  Waveanal  please email Bill Hibbert at bill@hibberts.co.uk

With the advent of PC’s has come various FFT software packages that can analyse standard PC wave files (.WAV extension) recorded using PC Sound Cards. The Trust developed its own PC software package back in 1995 which has been extensively used for bell sound analysis. More recently we have been extensively testing Waveanal, a software package written by Bill Hibbert15. We are very impressed with  Waveanal and are now using it in preference to our own software!

Sound of Bells – Analysing the Sound of a Bell - continued

The tape recording may be played into a spectrum analyser where the bell's partials are seen as peaks on the visual display (the horizontal axis being the frequency and the vertical axis the amplitude). The analyser will allow the user to find the precise frequency for each of the peaks. Unfortunately spectrum analysers are very expensive.

PC’s are very flexible and it is now commonplace for new PC’s to be fitted with a sound card, for example Soundblaster. The ancillary software is very useful. For example it may be used to make a digital recording of a bell’s sound which may be inspected (see example above) . Soundblaster Wavestudio software may also be used to simulate the augmentation of a ring by mixing the sound of the original bells with the proposed additions. This facility is particularly useful for checking the suitability of bells which cannot be re-tuned, and has lead to listed-for-preservation bells to find "new" homes as Ringing Bells when otherwise they may have been hung dead or left on the floor of a church.