Solo Chime -- Unique Clock Chime Tones

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The Cyclochron has a special chime tone that can be programmed to play once every 15 minutes, once every 30 minutes, once per hour, or not at all, over a 24-hour daily schedule.

The clock chime tone scheme is designed to provide a simple way to tell time from the sounds emitted. As far as clock chimes go, the classical Westminster chime only tells you the quarter part of the hour, and on the hour it chimes a repeating sequence that the listener must count robotically to determine the hour. If the listener is distracted or starts counting late, he/she may be in error in counting.

The Solo Chime is based on two musical tones set to be a pleasant interval apart, such as a musical major third or minor third. The hour is chimed, one note or beep per hous, but grouped into triple-note units. If the triple-note unit is complete, it is sounded with the higher tone at a specific speed. If there is a fraction of a triple group remaining, it is applied to the lower tone and at a slower rate (one-half the speed). For example, 5 o'clock has one triple note group plus a remainder of two that is applied to the lower note. The chart below graphically represents these tone patterns, the blue being the higher tone, the violet color representing the lower tone. Each tone sequence in the chart can also be played as a WAV sound file.

This grouping gives the whole sound an overall rhythmic character -- a Gestalt -- that allows the listener to easily ³decode² it or count out the hour from memory. Many people can even "play back" the correct pattern even if they were only slightly aware of its sounding; the Gestalt or overall musical figure can be remembered as a single unit, not as a sequence of individual notes such as the Westminster chime has.

So that the listener can determine the exact quarter-hour time, the overall hour sequence (what you see in the table below) is played once for each quarter of the hour that has passed. Thus at 15 minutes past each hour the pattern is played once, at 30 minutes it is played two times, at 45 minutes it sounds three times and on the hour it sounds four times (with the new pattern for that hour, of course). This corresponds to the melodic fragmentation of the Westminster chimes, which themselves carry no hour information. Here the tones always tell the hour.

A slight problem exists for one o¹clock and two o¹clock. The first Cyclochron clocks used the one-tone pattern shown below. However, it doesn¹t attract much attention, so two variations are shown where the tones are reversed for these two hours. These variations are likely to be used in future clock designs from Zetalink, but as an option settable in the user preferences. See the different graphical representations below, and listen to the examples.

If you click on any one of these a .WAV file will play an example of the sound. You must use the BACK button to return here. These use 8-bit samples at a low sampling frequency to keep the file size as small as possible. At the bottom there are four examples to show what the pattern is like for each quarter hour. Actually, to be precise, the buttons for all the hours in the chart should read 3:15, 4:15, 5:15, etc. because the sound samples only play once.

Why is this called the Solo Chime? When I invented this chime scheme, in 1991, I was living in Solo, a city in the central part of Java, a city with two names, the other being Surakarta. The city is famous as a the centre of the Javanese culture and arts, especially for music of the gamelan orchestra. There is undoubtedly an influence of the music in this chime, so I thought it appropriate to name it after Solo. -- Raymond Weisling