What is a carillon? Only one of the most metal instruments ever created (heh)! They're comprised of at least 23 tuned bells, and played via a console that looks like an oversize piano made of levers. The one I play has 61 bells and can be heard from more than half a mile away. The largest bell weighs 12,000 lbs.
If people are interested, I can post more recordings of this instrument and put together a little something introducing these sonorous beauties:
Yup, you warned me about this :). I think the closest I've ever come is playing the crotales, while my buddy played the chimes for our spring concert season UIL group percussion performance thingy in high school. About 1% of people within a half mile's radius would have found my act appealing, so if you're not getting death threats, you're doin' it right. Interested. I'm also interested in any future system to damp the notes, like, ya know how a damper pedal works on piano. It'd be massive, and probably have to be electrified. Maybe even played by a second person. Woof, that'd be a rough career, "I damp the maestro's previously struck bells when he's directed me to, to the best of my abilities, and I commonly let slip many other accidental instances of 'too-too' and similar atrocities". No worries though, demure, you're already the maestro.If people are interested,
Duly noted. The bells already have an intrinsic long ring to them (because if we remember a damper pedal on the piano, when pressed, lets the strings vibrate and die out naturally since it lifts the felts, whereas when it isn't pressed the felts will shorten the die-out time). Shortening their ring sounds terrible--you can do so by regulating the instrument poorly and it's just awful.Interested.
It doesn't have to be awful! Surely there are decent methods of damping out whatever oscillation mode you've induced in the bell that don't pinch it into a random dissonant note. It's just not gonna be cheap to hire someone to engineer it, and it'd be similarly expensive to build. Still, I'm kinda surprised it's not a thing yet. BRB, posting on why-combinator for investment solicitations. Narrator/schizophrenia: This sarcasm is particularly rich coming from the guy who spent a few hours yesterday, with fam in tow, at one of these places, which wouldn't exist without dat sweet startup oomph. tagging kleinbl00 for audioskillz
Wanna see where you made an ass out of u and me? With a string you've got one-dimensional oscillation modes. With a plate you've got two-dimensional oscillation modes with all the misadventures that entails; with a surface you've got three-dimensional oscillation modes and they're all interdependent. Also keep in mind that try as you might, the material properties of that bell aren't necessarily homogeneous across the bell and non-homogeniety is going to change your interdependencies away from what you know to what you don't. "Non-homogeniety" in this case being "damping one part but not all parts of the bell" because you suddenly changed the damping coefficient for part of the bell but not all of it. I accidentally made a bell in beat-on-shit-with-a-hammer class. It was dope. But I had two half-spheres of nickel silver, same treatment, same size, and one of them was a semitone more flat than the other. Why? Because bells are fucking complicated. I dug into it just enough to go "well damn, they were grinding the things in like seven different places to try and get the first five harmonics to line up to their temperament by ear" and recognized that me and my silver hammer should be happy with a semitone.oscillation mode