Eversholt Church Bells are to be retuned and rehung.
The bells are to be removed from the belfry in the week starting 2017-10-16. The oak bell frame is to be dismatled and removed. The bells are being sent for retuning. A new bell frame is to be constructed and the bells rehung sometime in 2018.
On 2017-09-16, Bob Churchill, bell captain, was kind enough to help Emrys Williams record the sound of the bells before rehanging. This may well be the last sound the bells produce in their present tune.
Bells swinging produce a sound modulated by the doppler effect. To make it easier to hear the effects of the returning, Emrys climbed to the belfry and struck each bell with a soft-faced mallet, on the outside of each bell, near where the clapper would hit on the inside. The bells were hanging free, not moving, so there was no doppler shift. The recording wasn’t great, because on the day the right microphone did not work 🙁 . A Nexus 7 Android tablet was used with the Field Recorder Android app for the recording, just using the tablet’s internal microphone, crawling from bell to bell above the bell frame. The individual bell sounds were brought together using the Audacity sound editor.
The result:
which actually sounds OK for a lashed-together recording kit.
Analysing bell sounds is very complicated. There’s a great account here but don’t start reading that unless you have a few hours to spare!
We’ll update this page with the sound of the returned bells for comparison, in 2018.