Richmond Bells
The bell ringers of St. Mary's Church in Richmond, Yorkshire together with Heritage Lottery funding proposed a project that would celebrate, explore and retain the heritage of bell ringing. Through a series of workshops in local schools a team of practitioners would engage local young people with the historical, practical and social aspects of bell ringing.
The project involved running a program of primary and secondary schools workshops to engage students using a range of creative, practical activities. The team of practitioners would bring their own professional experience and specialisms to the workshops and deliver a rich and diverse experience for the students who attended.
My role in this project was running the sound design workshops in schools, under the heritage theme ‘Bells as Sound - musicality, sound & shape’, and capturing field recordings of both the old and new bells for our exhibitions and online archive / resource.
Recording the Bells
The first task of the project was to actually record the original bells before their final ring. I've recorded loud instruments before - but nothing compares to the extreme sound pressure produced by church bells.
It was an unusual environment for recording. The bell tower was really cramped and really dusty.
I used a combination of microphones to capture the sound. Firstly I used a spaced pair of DPA Condenser microphones within the bell, and the clapper was used to sound each bell separately so I had an isolated recording of each bell.
Once I'd recorded each bell using a close micing technique, I decided to record each bell whilst being rung (by pulling the rope). The sound is completely different due to the movement of the bell, and the reverberation in the bell tower. The high sound pressure level was challenging, and three of the four microphone types were not suitable. I wanted to use something with a fairly flat frequency response (i.e. a condenser mic), and managed to capture the sound using a Soundfield SPS200 multi-capsule mic, which coped with the volume level and kept my options open for processing spatial information later.
As I had a clear recording of each bell without any background noise or acoustic interference, I was able to process each sound in a variety of ways using Adobe Audition, and GRM Tools for spectral editing. I used this process to build a library of new sounds which could be used during the workshops.
The project was fundamentally about the heritage of bell ringing, and I was thinking of various ways to engage the workshop participants in ringing the bell sounds. In the end, I decided to use controllers from the Nintendo Wii (called Wiimotes) to trigger the recordings - rather like ringing hand bells. The coding looks complex, but actually is relatively simple using the program application Max MSP.
Further Work:
Having completed the heritage project I wanted to continue working with the fascinating sounds I’d experienced. From meeting the bell tuner at Taylor’s Foundary in Loughborough I became really interested in the harmonic content of the bells and how the five primary harmonics are tuned in a specific way. As my PhD research was investigating Aural Architecture I wanted to explore this from within the bell itself. This would give me a unique experience to understand the evolving harmonics and how they resonate within the bell structure.