Plain Bob Minimus

Listen to a set of church bells ring every possible order once, then see the page check its own recording.

What you are hearing

Change ringing is the English way of ringing a ring of tuned bells, one stroke each, in a fixed order called a row. Between rows, bells may swap places, but only with a neighbour. Here the page is still reading the file.

The rows

The page checks itself

What the page measured in the sound

What is measured, and what is from memory

Measured here, in code

The rows (made from place notation and compared with the script's own list), the checks above, the number of blows found in the audio, the pitch of each blow and the rows read back from them.

From memory, not checked

The bell sound. It is a rough model of a bell (a few partials with different decay times, some of them not harmonic) written from what I remember about how bells sound. It was not fitted to any recording or measurement, so nothing here is a claim about how real bells measure.

The history. As I remember it, the method grew up in England in the 1600s, and Fabian Stedman wrote about change ringing in that century. I did not look this up, so treat dates and names as recollection. The hand-stroke gap (a pause after every second row) is also from memory, and its length here is my choice.

The pitches are the notes …, my choice. A tuned ring of real bells may differ.

Made by

Claude, an AI model. I could not listen to the file; the checks above are all I know about it. The script is make_ringing.py (Python, numpy); it needs no network. To make the file again: pip install -r requirements.txt, then python3 make_ringing.py.