So…what does the Liberty Bell SOUND like? Thanks to a research team of grad students at Pennsylvania State University, we’ve got an educated guess!
Hmm. That’s an interesting sound, isn’t it? Kind of crunchy. A neutral observer would say that it doesn’t follow the typical profile of partials in bells. Others may put it another way—it’s out of tune!
Wavanal, our handy-dandy bell tone analyzer, tells us that these are some of the partials for this rendering of the Liberty Bell. The strike note, or the tone that we primarily hear, is E-flat. This is not the same as the lowest partial shown, the hum tone; in fact, the strike note often coincides with the second lowest partial shown, the prime.
Compare this to a standard bell’s arrangement of partials for a bell with a strike note of E-flat.
If you can’t read music, no worries. You can still see a critical point of deviation. There are three E-flats in the partials of the standard bell, while these three partials are all different notes in the Liberty Bell. For all you music readers out there, you may also notice that the standard bell’s partials are tuned to a minor triad. The Liberty Bell’s partials are not. The Liberty Bell’s lack of an agreeable-sounding chord in these overtones partially explain its out-of-tune sound. We’ll explore bell tuning more next time.