Change ringing: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 11:58, 17 May 2007

Revision as of 11:59, 17 May 2007

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Method ringing is what many people mean by change ringing. Thanks to it, ringers can spend hours ringing thousands upon thousands of unique changes with no outside direction or coordination. They do not have to memorize impossible quantities of data; nor do they attempt to read it all off some dizzying sheet of numbers. Rather, they are all following a ''method'', a relatively simple pattern they have learnt to direct them from row to row.

Since a ringer is responsible for one bell, learning a method consists mainly of memorizing how that bell changes position from row to row; when it advances towards the beginning ("goes down to the front") or when it retreats towards the end ("goes up to the back"). Often ringers study a ''blueline'', a graphical representation of a bell's course from row to row according to a particular method. The methods are simple enough to memorize and so are relatively limited in length; but taken in conjunction with slight standard variations the ringers know to make at regular breaking points, a more robust [[algorithm]] is formed. From time to time and usually when the treble is leading (that is when bell number 1 is ringing first), a conductor calls out the need for another variation by calling "bob" or "single".

For some people, the ultimate goal of this system is to ring ''all'' the permutations, to ring a tower's bells in every possible order without repeating — what is called an "extent" (or sometimes, formerly, a "full peal"). The feasibility of this depends on how many bells are involved: if a tower has <math>n</math> bells, they will have <math>n!</math> (read [[factorial]]) possible permutations, a number that becomes quite large as <math>n</math> grows. For example, while six bells have 720 permutations, 8 bells have 40,320; furthermore, 10! = 3,628,800, and 12! = 479,001,600. Estimating two seconds for each change (a reasonable pace), we find that while an extent on 6 bells can be accomplished in half an hour, a full peal on 8 bells should take nearly twenty-two and a half hours. (When in [[1963]] ringers in [[Loughborough]] became the first and only in history to achieve this feat on tower bells, it actually took them just under 18 hours.<ref>[http://www.cccbr.org.uk/rc/long_lengths/40320_plain_bob_major.html Online peal board], from the Central Council records committee</ref>) An extent on 12 bells would take over thirty years!

Since extents are obviously not always practicable, ringers more often undertake shorter performances. Such ringing starts and ends with rounds, having meanwhile visited only a subset of the available permutations; but ''trueness'' is still considered essential — no row can ever be repeated; to do so would make the ringing ''false''. A performance of at least 5000 changes can be called a ''peal'' and likewise 1250 changes or more make a ''quarter peal''. (They tend to last about three hours and 45 minutes, respectively.) On seven bells or less, a peal is the extent of 5040 (=7!) changes and a quarter peal 1260 changes. A short stretch of ringing, perhaps only a few hundred changes, is called a ''touch''.

{{Listen|filename=Bob Minor, Synthesised Bell Sounds.ogg|title=Plain Bob Minor|description=Plain Bob Minor played using synthesised bell sounds. The bells start ringing rounds followed by a plain course of Plain Bob Minor (60 of the 720 changes that are possible on six bells) and finish in rounds again.|format=[[Ogg]]}}