Subjective evaluation and an objective measure of a church bell sound quality

Abstract

The research described in this paper attempts to give an answer to a very old question about a good sounding bell. To this end, a large number of listening tests were performed in which ten bells were compared in pairs to investigate whether bells could be evaluated by subjective sound quality. Furthermore, two new parameters that can be used for objective evaluation of bell sound quality are proposed: the nearest ideal bell deviation and the percentage of the sound energy contained in the first five partials. The ten bells were compared based on the values of the introduced objective parameters. The paper presents correlation of the subjective and the objective analysis, demonstrating applicability of a novel method for bell sound quality assessment.