Glass Bell

How it's made

Source

a small glass bell tapped gently by a soft clapper. The contact is a 1–3 ms low-passed noise burst; a gentler strike lowers the cutoff and lengthens the contact, so the attack is light.

Body

a thin glass shell rings in inharmonic modes (≈ 1 : 2.32 : 4.25 : 6.63 : 9.38 of the nominal pitch, 2.2 kHz by default). Glass is stiff and lightly damped, so the fundamental rings longest (up to `decay`) while the upper modes fade first and make the fragile, crystalline first 100 ms.

Beating

the shell is never perfectly round, so each mode is a pair of modes 0.3–3 Hz apart; the tail shimmers slowly as the pairs drift in and out of phase (`shimmer`).

Envelope

near-instant onset (<1 ms), exponential decay per mode, then a final fade so the tail ends cleanly at about 2 s.

Variation

`rng` mistunes every mode by up to ±0.3 % and varies the contact noise; presets change pitch, ring time, strike softness and shimmer (magic cue, table bell, tiny tap, large glass).

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