The study of tintinnabulation!<p><a href="https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tintinnabulation" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tintinnabulation</a><p>One of the many remarkable things about Elizabeth II’s death was the amount of bell ringing to be heard. It was also a rare opportunity to hear muffled bells being rung — the muffles used as a mark of respect for the nation in mourning.<p>The upcoming coronation will see many teams around England attempting some record breaking change ringing. I’m assuming Westminster Abbey will go for something enormous. If you’ve not heard of change ringing before, try to imagine pressing each key on your keyboard’s numpad in sequence and (i) doing it for every possible sequence, (ii) instead of pushing all the buttons yourself you do it as a team of twelve, and (iii) instead of pushing a key you have to swing a 500lb cast metal bell hanging thirty feet over your head.
I used to be roommates with an engineering student who wrote his thesis on the restoration of a famous bell (I can't go into details as the fact the bell was defunct at all wasn't public information). They talked to experts in the field and read a boatload of theory. The restoration succeeded but everyone held their breath when the bell was first struck again with public attention.<p>There is a lot going into the science of how bells work. There are charts and diagrams and tables and fancy formulas, there are endless simulations, there are standards for measuring resonance, changes in density, impurities and whatever.<p>However, it's all meaningless. It's technically impossible for the foreseeable future to predict how a bell will sound if struck for the first time. We can with some degree of accuracy predict how likely it is to crack or how quickly it will degrade and we know how to make bells that will sound a certain way based on centuries (if not millenia) of practical experience. But in the same way we know Aspirin helps with headaches but don't have the science or technology to understand why and how the effect could be replicated, "bell science" is mostly informed by practical experience and niche cultural knowledge not the kind of stuff you can actually find in engineering papers.
My dad is 90, and has been doing change ringing in churches for eighty years. He was encouraged to start by his father when he was 10 as there weren't enough people to ring church bells as so many had gone to fight in the war. Change ringing is very much a branch of combinatorics!
If you like bells, a couple of pieces of amazing 20C music might appeal.<p>Firstly, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem uses bells prominently and to great emotional effect in the first movement, which presages a line in the next movement "What passing bells for these who die as cattle?"[1]. Arvo Part then referred to this by using bells beautifully in his "Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten"[2]. In fact bells (and the concept of "Tintinnabulation") form a major part of Part's musical language, most famously "Tabula Rasa"[3] which uses prepared piano to make bell-like sounds as well as employing tintinnabuli in the string parts.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJwaF1Kb_i8&list=PLntD4v5IQmdUtS2TRooTNlYzuAxJikZi5&index=1">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJwaF1Kb_i8&list=PLntD4v5IQm...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2oxWdRMuk">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2oxWdRMuk</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSSv_JEZwdo&list=PLZgDvxgjzgXbU5hUWtvQEDiIkYUB4HCt8">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSSv_JEZwdo&list=PLZgDvxgjzg...</a>
way in left field--the last scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Andrei Rubliev" is a son of a bellmaker making a bell for a nobleman because the rest of his family has died. It is fascinating to watch though I don't know how historically correct it is to the actual process. He only knows whay he knows from watching his father so is mostly making it up as he goes along, directing 20-30 people on the process. (Critics usually take the story as a metaphor for a young film maker directing an equal number of cast and crew and having to look through it all like he knows what he's doing.)
A key excerpt from the wikipage is:<p>> A campanologist is one who studies campanology, though it is popularly misused to refer to a bell ringer<p>I once used the term to describe my sister, who quickly told me she was a bell ringer, and that bell ringers never call themselves campanologists.
Episode of Midsomer Murders: Ring Out Your Dead - <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647499/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647499/</a> - that was previously to reading this wikipedia article the sum total of my bell ringing knowledge.
For the real fans, Bells On Sunday: <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh</a>
Makes me think that bells are really a great way to communicate over large distances in the time before we had radio or other means. You can hear church bells from a great distance.
Wow, this made me look up what one of my favorite band's name means: Wednesday Campanella (水曜日のカンパネラ) - Campanella apparently means "little bell" in Italian.