This applet allows you to design a bell tower with up to eight bells, and ring the bells using change ringing. I didn't know what that was, until very recently, so if my explanation of change ringing given below is not very accurate you know why.

You can edit the pitches of the bells, the sharpness of the hammer striking the bell, and the number of modes. The sounds of bells 1-2(B) are synthesized using physical modeling. Some technical details of the synthesis can be found here . No sounds have to be downloaded over the net to get the applet to play bells 1 and 2(B) but bell 3 uses sampled sounds, which amount to about 130K, compared to about 66K for the applet.

The number of "modes" is the number of vibration modes of each bell that are taken into account. Setting this to a large value gives a complex sound but takes more time to compute. Setting it to a low value makes the sound simpler, but computes faster. If you set it to one, you get sinusoidal sounds.

You can chose between two bells, called Bell 1 and Bell 2, 2B or "Sample". The original sounds were analyzed and a model based on those sounds was made. I found the original sounds on the web at http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/multimedia/sun-sounds/sound_effects (Bell 1, towerclock.au) and http://www.angelfire.com/ca/jamtt/sounds.htm (Bell 2(B), bell.wav). You can hear the original by clicking on the words "Bell" in the first sentence of this paragraph.