The international event is seen as a 'powerful symbolic signal for peace' by the Grassmayr Bell Foundry in Austria which has organised the bell-ringing to mark its 400th anniversary.
Carillons are a set of chromatically tuned bells played from a keyboard and struck mechanically.
There are about 620 world-wide, mostly in Holland, Belgium and North America. As a musical instrument it pre-dates the piano and harpsichord by more than 200 years. The oldest carillon bell still in use, cast in 1380, is in Halle, Belgium . The National War Memorial Carillon is the third largest carillon in the world. The smallest bells of the Wellington instrument weigh about 15kgs.