Wind Chimes

How it's made

Source

a hanging set of metal tubes knocked by a clapper that the breeze swings. Each strike is a 1–3 ms low-passed noise click; harder gusts strike harder and more often.

Body

a free-free tube rings in inharmonic bending modes at 1 : 2.76 : 5.40 : 8.93 of its fundamental. The fundamental lasts several seconds, the upper modes fade within a fraction of that, so the strike is bright and the tail is a pure, mellow tone. Each mode is a pair a fraction of a hertz apart (tube asymmetry) that makes the tail shimmer slowly.

Tuning

every tube is one note of a major pentatonic scale over two octaves (1, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2, 5/3 × 1–2), so any random combination of overlapping tails stays consonant.

Events

strikes are a Poisson process whose rate follows a slow gust envelope (5–30 s): calm lulls with a single tone every few seconds, then flurries of several tubes colliding. Strike strength is random.

Variation

`rng` picks the note, strength, stereo position (tubes hang around a circle), tuning ±0.15 % and beating of every strike.

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