Abstract
For centuries, religious buildings have been using bells to call the faithful to prayer. Bell-ringing activity on church premises does not serve a purely religious function, however, as people in the community may perceive this activity secularly, attributing their own meanings and significances towards these sounds. If bell ringing (or the actual sound) were found to have great significance to a specific community, denomination, or a regionality bracket, this may have future implications in any management of these resources. There is a need to hear the voices of the actual practitioners and their perceptions regarding what they, their congregations, and their host communities feel. This paper represents the first large-scale assessment of the views of practitioners of five major Christian denominations with regards to bell-ringing practice and its role in contemporary society.
Highlights
As a social species living in villages, towns, and cities, humans have created soundscapes that may be ancillary, i.e., emanate from activities conducted by people, or intentional, i.e., emanate from sound-making devices designed to alert the public to dangers, or to notify the public of impending events (Parker and Spennemann n.d.b)
The acoustic environment can be seen as a resource (Dumyahn and Pijanowski 2011a; Brown 2011), and its meaning and pleasantness is determined by our personal situation, our prior experience, cultural background, the perceived dynamic, and the contextual attributes of the sounds themselves (Kitapci and Galbrun 2015; Lam et al 2010; Bruce and Davies 2014)
There is an increasing discontent among residents living near religious premises, with noise complaints about bell ringing on record, inter alia, from places as diverse as England (Hargraves 2018; Carney 2014; Gerder 2020; Vickery 2020), France (Connexion 2019), Malta (Borg 2007), Slovenia (Plahuta 2013), South Africa (Pimentel 2019), and Switzerland (Bachmann 2018), as well as various states of the USA, e.g., California (Park and Mac 2015), New York (Kaysen 2015), and Vermont (Rathke 2015)
Summary
As a social species living in villages, towns, and cities, humans have created soundscapes that may be ancillary, i.e., emanate from activities conducted by people (e.g., factory sounds, sounds emerging from traffic), or intentional, i.e., emanate from sound-making devices designed to alert the public to dangers (e.g., car horns or loudspeaker announcements at subway stations), or to notify the public of impending events (Parker and Spennemann n.d.b). There is an increasing discontent among residents living near religious premises, with noise complaints about bell ringing on record, inter alia, from places as diverse as England (Hargraves 2018; Carney 2014; Gerder 2020; Vickery 2020), France (Connexion 2019), Malta (Borg 2007), Slovenia (Plahuta 2013), South Africa (Pimentel 2019), and Switzerland (Bachmann 2018), as well as various states of the USA, e.g., California (Park and Mac 2015), New York (Kaysen 2015), and Vermont (Rathke 2015). New Zealand, and the United Kingdom have similar attendance rates, while the USA has higher attendance rates (36%) (Pew 2020)
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