A couple of months ago I experimented with splitting up a single recording of a harmonically-tuned church bell into some of its individual partials and used it to form a piece of music using Reaper.

The clock is a turret clock recorded in a church tower. The tolling bell is the Wheatley (near Oxford) tenor bell (A-flat, about ½ a ton) transposed down an octave. I have isolated the main partial frequencies from this one recording, these being mainly octave harmonics but also include the minor-third and fifth, these appearing like points of light interspersed with small organ bursts (using Hauptwerk) and piano inversions of the minor partials. The organ mutations (from a sample set of the organ at Giubiasco, Switzerland) are also based on fifths/twelfths. The background accompaniment is played on the Viola da Gamba and Voce Umana (the latter of which is tuned slightly off to give the ethereal effect when combined with the former). To add some bass I used 16's and a 32' sub bass from the Armley organ sample set. (I tried to find a mutation stop based on a minor third (19th harmonic), but they are few and far between! It should be possible to construct one using Hauptwerk.)

Partials

The first sound is the bell before I have tuned it (with some clipping).  This is the 10th bell (of thirteen) from St. Michael's Church, Bishop's Stortford, Herts.  It weighs just over half a ton and was tuned at the workshops of Whites of Appleton, Church Bellhangers, near Oxford, U.K.
We then hear the overhead crane being used to lift the bell, with the associated sounds of lifting chains and safety hooks.  The bell is turned on its side, then upside down, and then lifted on to the turntable of the tuning machine.
The tuning machine is started up; first the oil pump, then the main motor and then a relay click.  The clunking sound is the gearbox changing speed.
The next part is the sound of the cutting tool of the machine removing metal from the bell as it rotates.  The change in rhythm is the slight unsymmetrical profile of the bell. It fades out as the cut finishes. 
Tuning a bell takes about one and a half days, and this is the recording of just one of many cuts that are taken.
The final part is the sound of the tuned bell being tested.

Tuning a Bell

A warp-speed point-to-point journey from calm to chaos and back.  Field recordings from various bell towers and other locations.

Mark Walker