Sounds like a missed opportunity. ASCII maybe could have had BLL, BLM, BLH (low, medium, high) with different frequencies and you could have encoded something in those bells instead of having to count a sequence.
So they had a block of 31 control character (forget null, and delete obviously wasn’t in there because of paper tape).
Many of those control characters were and are useful (^s for stop, ^r for resume) much of the space was empty and so randomly assigned. There would have been room for more bell characters, but that wasn’t really the mentality of the day.
But come to think of it, ASCII was (ca. 1960) firmly based in the cards + operator days.
https://speakerdeck.com/alblue/a-brief-history-of-unicode?sl...
There’s link to the video recording in the comments if you’re interested.