Tintinnalogia: A 17th-century technique for generative music

video upload by Electrum Modular

"Introducing my second sequencer for the Disting NT: Tintinnalogia. This Lua script (written with Claude) is an implementation of 'change ringing.' Invented in 17C England, change ringing is essentially a procedure for ringing church bells. It’s an early example of algorithmic composition, and is also proto-minimalist in its emphasis on a fixed, deterministic process. So...perfect for music-making on the modular!

All Tintinnalogia needs is a sample player with multiple trigger inputs: eg ALM Squid Salmple, Bitbox, or Disting’s own Sample Player.

Random thought: if the number of bells could be increased to 12, the script could be a twelve-tone serialism machine!

Free download: https://github.com/expertsleepersltd/...

Sources consulted - all highly recommended:

Katherine Hunt, 'The Art of Changes: Bell-Ringing, Anagrams, and the Culture of Combination in Seventeenth-Century England,' Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2018): connects change ringing to 'mathematical recreations' and to Early Modern ars combinatoria such as anagrams. If there was a meaning to change ringing, it was the 'exhaustion of meaning.'

Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (2015): specifically, the chapter on bells.

Robert Adam Hill, 'The Reformation of the Bells in Early Modern England' (PhD thesis, 2012): dispels the assumption that bells lost their earlier, sacred meanings in the era of change ringing.

Brian Eno, 'Bells and their History,' Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, ed. Paul D. Miller (2008). 'The same supply of metal would be made into cannon in wartime and would go back to bells after hostilities were over'

Thumbnail image shows cartoon of British PM, Robert Peel, as a change-ringer, getting tied up in the ropes. © The Trustees of the British Museum, shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Film sequence from Church Bells Ring on Civil Defence Day in Great Britain (1942), provided by the Sherman Grinberg Film Library, Los Angeles.

#modularsynth #electronicmusic #algorithmicmusic #eurorack"