Hum to bell

What a bell does to a hum

A glockenspiel lives at the top of the orchestra: its parts are written in the treble clef and sound two octaves higher; the app's glockenspiel runs from G5 to C8. So the page moves your hum up two octaves as well, its middle note between C6 and B6, inside that range.

A bell doesn't stop when the next note comes: every strike rings on for a second or two and the notes pile up. A fast hum turns into a blur, so the page starts on Simplified, one note per beat; switch to Quantized if your hum was slow anyway.

Glockenspiel or FM bell

Glockenspiel is a recorded instrument, played from six samples across its range, the one the app plays too. FM bell is built here the way John Chowning described it in 1973: one sine wave modulating another at a ratio of 1 to 1.4, which gives partials that aren't whole multiples of the note, the metallic part of a bell. The modulation fades with the loudness, so the strike is bright and the ring turns plain.

A bell's own hum

A church bell isn't one pitch: it rings a stack of partials, and they have names. The lowest is called the hum, an octave below the strike note you hear; above it come the prime, a minor third called the tierce, the quint and the nominal. Played on a bell, your hum gains a chord of partials it never had.

What's in the pack

Five MIDI files, one per timing, on channel 1, in your key and tempo, five WAVs on the bell you chose, exactly two bars long, and a README. The MIDI holds the notes where they sound; a glockenspiel part on paper would be written two octaves lower.

Bells ring past the bar line, so the WAVs are rendered twice round and the second pass kept: the last note's ring is already under the first beat, and the loop never jumps.

Into your DAW

Any bell, celesta, music box or glockenspiel instrument plays the MIDI. For the FM bell, an FM synth such as Ableton's Operator, FL Studio's Sytrus or a DX7 clone: a modulator at 1.4 times the carrier and a modulation that decays fast. Add a little reverb and the ring keeps going.

Sources: two octaves above written from Wikipedia, Glockenspiel and Grinnell College's instrument collection; the FM bell from Chowning's 1973 paper and Cycling '74's FM tutorial; the partials from Wikipedia, Strike tone and Bill Hibbert's bell acoustics.

Or hear it in a track

Hear it in a track opens Brumm with the melody on the grid on the app's glockenspiel, under a beat. For the same hum plucked instead of rung, try Hum to pluck.

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