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Abel – bells and computers

29th August 2009 @ 8:08am – by Audlem Webteam
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The six bells of St. James Church, Audlem, were cast in 1736 by Abel Rudhall of Gloucester. Abel would probably have expected that his bells would still be ringing out loud and clear across the Cheshire countryside nearly 300 years later (in spite of occasional local objections), but he would surely have been amazed to find that he had given his name to a computer program.

Abel, created by Audlem resident Chris Hughes, simulates the bell-ringer's environment on a PC to allow the ringer to practice individually and quietly.

The Abel program was first developed in 1993 for DOS-based PCs, then extended to the various flavours of Microsoft Windows, and, in what is believed to be a world "first", it is now available on Apple Macs. In this form it is known, logically enough, as Mabel.

Abel has been provided to hundreds of towers, mainly in England but with others all over the old British Empire – wherever the English went they took their own idiosyncratic way of ringing bells with them. In addition, thousands of bell ringers use Abel for practising on PCs at home

The Abel program contains the knowledge of most of the vast number of possible ringing methods that have been developed over the years, which helps the novice and expert bell-ringer alike to get the sequences clear before ringing a real bell. More interestingly, the computer can be linked to a sensor on the bell itself (which is temporarily silenced for the purpose), and can then detect the timing of the ringing so that bell-ringers can practice the actual pulling of the rope. The computer produces a very realistic ringing sound for the bell being pulled and for the other bells in the sequence.

Abel is no substitute for the real thing, of course, but it does mean that some of the more tortuous initial attempts at ringing by novices do not have to be inflicted on the sensitive ears of local residents.


This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.

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