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Comment by Symbiote | Hacker News Reader

Church bells chime on the hour for most of the day.

They’re rather more melodious and smooth-toned, and typically quieter at the point they’re heard. Not harsh and jarring like those awful beeping watches.

I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.

> I once imagined a nightmare: a classroom full of children who all had watches that beeped on the hour, not synchronised, with slightly varied pitches and patterns.

That was my classroom throughout the 80s and 90s.

I don’t think I ever experienced more than two or three, and that was bad enough. Say you’ve got thirty children, thirty watches, spread over five minutes, that’s an average of one every ten seconds.

It was most pupils in my classes. Kids got kudos for having fancier/louder chimes than others. Then came the rush of calculator watches, so everyone started getting watches confiscated before exams, and that other teacher's favourite: the TV Remote watch. Our school admistered masking tape and/or TipEx over the IR receivers to tackle this.

Same here, I think (but then this was quite a while ago) even the early mobile phones had such features.

The Elizabeth Tower in Westminster chimes a song every 15 minutes, progressively adding a new verse for each quarter, until on the hour you get the full song followed by a bong for each hour that it is.

As a child it fascinated me, but as an adult (who had a job in the area) it got tedious really quickly. 15 minutes is not that long.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westminster_Quarters

The place I recently stayed at in Umbria, Italy for New Year helpfully tolled bells 1-to-4 times each 15 minutes to describe whereabouts in the hour we were. All night long.

Pretty common for church bells in Austria too. 1-4 times for 15 min intervals, and then on the full hour, after the four chimes, the number of the hour.

When would it chime 4 times?

Sorry, I didn't make this quite clear. At the full hour it first chimes four times, to denote that it's a full hour, and then, after a small pause, the number of the hour.

But not during the night...

They used to at least. Since I live in the city now I can't tell personally but I just called my mother and she says the clock tower in her town also rings during the night.

Edit: From what I could gather in a couple of minutes it still seems to be pretty widespread. There have been some court cases about it, to get specific churches to silence the bells, but not in general.

From various anecdotes, I'd expect that the locals slept soundly. But if the bell mechanism somehow broke during the night - a fair number of them would wake up, wondering at the odd silence.

It’s the same here (our 2km² city center has 5 churches, so you are never far from one), and I can confirm. You sleep easily through those, and I only hear them subconsciously. When someone is visiting and complains about how loud it is, I sometimes have to ask what they are talking about.

And then in Ireland, the bells occasionally toll eleventy billion starting at 10 to the hour.

If you're lucky. I used to live very near to a cathedral that started practicing change ringing Christmas carols in about October, generally with more enthusiasm than skill.

Is noise pollution. Nobody needs that anymore, but nobody knows how to stop it.

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