Olympic Bells

One of the sounds heard all over Greece are bells ringing, and this was to be featured in the Opening Ceremony.

To enable there to be flexibility to meet whatever might be required it was decided to create a huge palette of bell sounds.

Vassilia Katsani, who was coordinating the whole production, found a monastery in western Greece that, uniquely, had a bell tower containing 62 bells.

We were kindly allowed by the monks of St Augustine and Seraphim Sarof Monastery to invade their solitude and spend 16 hours multi-recording every single bell.

Numerous farm animals kept by the monastery (not a sound to be heard on the recce) joined in at frequent intervals during the day, excited by the incessant clanging. The final note of the day was accompanied by the pet ostrich demanding it's dinner!

The bells at the monastery are normally struck mechanically by an automated striker which has a single dynamic. To enable us to a wide range of tones each bell was manually hit from quiet to very loud.

We used a Metric Halo ULN2 audio convertor with Neumann microphones to record directly to an Apple laptop all of which had to be winched/carried up the bell tower.

The resulting hours of recording were then edited and compiled into a computer program.

See next page for further information and to listen to the bells.

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