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Campanology

en.wikipedia.org

52 pointssatoshiiii35 comments

The study of tintinnabulation!

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tintinnabulation

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.

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.

Despite not being religious at all, I have done a bit of bell ringing. In response to (iii), the actual ringing of the bell is fairly easy once you get into the rhythm.

From speaking to the regulars (who wanted me to keep coming back so I'd be prepared and available to ring for the Coronation), I can tell you that a full peal requires at least 5040 changes (swaps, if you will, so instead of ringing 1-2-3-4 you might ring 1-3-2-4) and take a good 3-4 hours to complete!

Yes, I've rung about 20 peals most of them taking over 3 hours. Physically it's not that difficult but it is a mental challenge as you can't let your mind wander otherwise you will go wrong and the whole sequence of 5000+ changes (combinations) will be terminated prematurely.

And the upshot of (iii) is that you have to start swinging that bell _before_ the preceding bell has sounded.

This is called "ropesight" and is the hardest thing to grasp about bellringing. Essentially you need to watch, out of the corner of your eye, every other ringer in the chamber: typically six bells in a village parish church, eight in many town churches, 12 or even more in a cathedral. When you've identified which ones should be sounding before you in the sequence, you need to make sure your bell is swinging a fraction of a second after theirs. To do this you need to watch their movements, listen to the pace of the bells, and have full control of the speed you're swinging the bell.

For an experienced ringer it's second nature. But it's the hardest thing for a beginner to learn.

That so musically wells?

From the bells, bells, bells, bells.

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.

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.

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.

So what you’re saying is they’re the real audiophiles who aren’t crackpots

> It's technically impossible for the foreseeable future to predict how a bell will sound if struck for the first time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31327966

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!

The first program I wrote was to generate changes for bell ringing. That was over 50 years ago and I'm still writing change ringing software today!

Fascinating!

The book Anathem has a whole slew of stuff on changes and caused me to read up on them, I never realized there was specialist software for this.

> combinatorics

Like this (serious question, I'm becoming fascinated with this post):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lyDCUKsWZs (at 1:25)

If you like bells, a couple of pieces of amazing 20C music might appeal.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJwaF1Kb_i8&list=PLntD4v5IQm...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp2oxWdRMuk

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSSv_JEZwdo&list=PLZgDvxgjzg...

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.)

I like how much media ends up being about itself being made, if you squint hard enough.

It has to be one of the most robust meta-feedback loops, because the "vision" for the scene is apparent to everyone in real life.

A key excerpt from the wikipage is:

> A campanologist is one who studies campanology, though it is popularly misused to refer to a bell ringer

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.

Indeed we don't in the same way that beer drinkers don't call themselves biochemists - even though some of them may be.

Speaking of beer and bell ringers here's what the Rev H. T Ellacombe had to say about them in 1861:

"it was a well-known fact that, as a body, a more drunken set of fellows could not be found."

"I have heard of clergymen who have even refused to accept a living where there was a peal of bells; and of those who have said, upon learning the number of the bells in the tower, 'Then, certain it is, there are as many drunkards in the village.' 'That man is a ringer,' is is quite enough in some places to intimate that he is an idle, sottish character. I know one clergyman curacy who left his curacy in Worcestershire on account of the conduct of the ringers."

Some traditions are worth keeping up ;-)

Time for a new D&D class, Campanologist! Ringing your foes to death, and inflicting tinnitus.

Don’t forget to account for the healing power of cowbells.

Definitely some flavor of bard.

Some variation of bard, capable of wearing heavy armor, owing to how heavy these bells are.

I'm thinking it'd be more about hilarious abuse of "summon instrument" than carrying them around.

[EDIT] Oh shit, bring those French Easter-egg-laying bells in as a magical beast and they can have a mount!

That would be really cool, it could be like artificer or alchemist in some games, you masterfully tune bells to ring tones of mystic power, and ringing them in the correct sequence has the effect of casting a spell

Or a paladin-esque bard carrying around massive bells.

Episode of Midsomer Murders: Ring Out Your Dead - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647499/ - that was previously to reading this wikipedia article the sum total of my bell ringing knowledge.

For those who prefer reading books, there's always the precursor: _The_Nine_Tailors_ by Dorothy L Sayers. If you can find it, I believe there was a program or series called something like _Lord_Peter_Wimsey_ that aired on PBS that may have aired some time before the turn of the century.

For the real fans, Bells On Sunday: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh

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.

Yep, bells were used to regulate communal activities like prer, holidays, weddings, burials, and danger. Later - announcing the hour. They are intrusive and expensive though, so for long-distance communication they had to use other means like fire, smoke, doves, and horse curriers.

Also flags, lamps (with shutters on ships, lighthouses), telegraphs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy), and beacons so that Gondor can call for aid.

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.

As a background try https://youtu.be/AgZXZ0OkwSg

Why?

Why not ? Bells are a hallmark of the soundscape of Western civilization.

This is a lazy question imo.

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