Bell from Hell

BELL FROM HELL

The sound of different bells (mostly church bells and clock bells) inspired my to write this piece.

I find the sound of the bells particularly interesting because of their complexity and psychoacoustic effects.

I was fascinated in the first place by the behaviour or most church bells, whose strike tone has a very clear fundamental and harmonics, with a subharmonic or hum tone (which is actually the real fundamental) whilst the secondary strike notes correspond to the inharmonic partials.

The fact that the human ear can hardly recognise the true fundamental makes the bells interesting from the psychoacoustic point of view and have been used by many composers.

In addition I find the bell's sound interesting because of  its  extremely long, rich and complex resonance and noise content. Those two things are the basis of my composition.

However I want to make clear that I do not intend to make the harp sound like a bell or create a metaphor of it, this is just an inspiration and an idea for the compositional work.

The materials from the piece come mostly from different spectral analysis of some bells with a someway particular sound.

Those materials are divided in three main groups: Noisy materials, simple resonances and complex resonances.

The piece is structured as a series of bell strikes, which are executed as noisy attacks followed by simple or complex resonances. The different development of every resonance determines the next attack.

In this sense the role of the electronics is crucial, as it will mainly process the resonances “in vivo“.