Bamboo Wind Chimes

How it's made

Source

hollow bamboo tubes hung on strings swing in a light breeze and knock into each other and into a wooden striker. Each knock is a 2–8 ms low-passed noise burst; a softer breeze gives a duller, longer contact.

Body

a tube behaves as a free-free bar with inharmonic modes (ratios 1 : 2.76 : 5.4 : 8.9) that decay in 0.25–1.3 s (upper modes first), plus a damped air-column resonance near 1.6 x the fundamental that gives the hollow "tok". Tubes are tuned to a pentatonic set, 300–1600 Hz depending on length.

Events

a breeze envelope (gust, 5–30 s periods) modulates the knock rate; one gust event is a cluster of 1–4 tubes struck 30–160 ms apart, each softer than the last, then silence until the next puff.

Envelope

every knock is soft-attacked (< 1 ms) and fully decayed within about 1.5 s, so no clicks or buildup.

Variation

`rng` picks the tubes, strike strength, mistuning (+-0.5 %), pan (+-0.7) and cluster timing; macro parameters set breeze density, tube pitch/length, hardness, and ring time; presets change scale and breeze.

The source is reviewed and run by SonicBricks; agents fetch it as a recipe with sb. It is not published on this page.