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Take hold
Each line of numbers is a row: every bell struck once, in that order. Your bell is blue and the treble is red; the lines show how each one works its way through the rows. Listen first. Then press Ring, and strike your bell with the space bar (or tap the rope) whenever the blue line reaches the lit position. The band does not wait.
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Left and right arrow keys walk to other days. Every day is a different tower.
Your blue line
Nobody memorises the rows. What a ringer learns is the path of one bell through a plain course, lead by lead, and which bit of it they start from — the place bell they become at each lead head. That path is traditionally printed in blue, which is why ringers call it the blue line. Here it is for your rope, with the treble in red and each lead head written across the top.
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- Method
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- Place notation
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- Lead
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- Plain course
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- Extent
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- A peal at this pace
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- Your place bells
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Call a touch
Left alone, a method comes back to rounds after its plain course. To ring longer without ringing any row twice, a conductor calls bobs and singles, each of which swaps a different pair at one lead end and sends the bells off into rows they have not rung yet. Write one letter per lead — p for plain, b (or -) for a bob, s for a single — and the room proves it. Or ask it to find one; then ring it above.
| Lead | Call | Lead head |
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The plain course, written out
Every row of the plain course, one lead to a column, lead heads underlined and your bell in blue. This is what the whole band is producing together; each of them only has to know their own line through it.
What is real here and what is not
The ringing is the genuine article. The tower, and everyone in it, is not anywhere.
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01
The methods are real
Every method in the list is rung in towers today, and is stored here the way ringers write them down: place notation, where x means every pair swaps and a number means that place stays put. Nothing else is given. Every row on this page is generated from that one string, and every plain course is checked to come back to rounds without repeating itself.
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02
Truth is real
A touch is true if no row appears twice. Six bells can be arranged 720 ways, so 720 is the most you can ring on six without repeating — the extent. The prover above checks every row against every other; the composer is a blind depth-first search that backs out the moment it meets a row it has already used. It is slow and stupid next to a real composer, but what it finds is true.
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03
The rhythm is real
A bell swings a full circle each blow, so the rope alternates handstroke and backstroke. Before every handstroke there is a gap exactly one blow long — the open handstroke lead — and it is in here. Real bands strike to within a few hundredths of a second; the band here is allowed a small, fixed wobble of its own, and so, for scoring, are you.
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04
The bells are approximations
A tuned bell rings with a hum, a prime, a tierce a minor third above it, a quint and a nominal — the partials are at those ratios here, which is why it sounds like a bell and not an organ. But they are clean sine waves, and a real bell's partials beat, warble and are never quite where the tuner meant them. The tenor weight and key follow a rough cube-root rule, and are invented.
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Some calls are missing
Bobs and singles are modelled only for methods where a call changes the one change at the lead end. Grandsire and Stedman calls reach into the rows around the lead end too, and this room does not attempt them, so for those the plain course is all there is. A blind search also will not turn up the 720 of Plain Bob Minor in time, although it exists and bands ring it every week.
Twenty-six rooms and the number is still the only thing doing any work. Here it consecrates a church, weighs a tenor, picks a method off the list and puts a rope in your hands — and for once, whether it goes well depends on you keeping up with everybody else.