The project began when the Melbourne International Festival of the Arts enlisted the team's Australian Bell Company to create a series of bells for the 100th anniversary of Australian Federation. In their quest to make a big noise at the celebrations in 2001, the lads enlisted a few unlikely allies and some heavy technology. The sound of a bell is a series of frequencies called partials. When these partials fall into a certain series, they are called a harmonic sequence.
Harmonic sequences are the basis for the human voice and most musical instruments.
They're what we use to determine pitch. This is what McLachlan and Hasell have created. In the 17th century, bell makers started tuning their handiwork in the hope of achieving this. But, according to McLachlan, they had a long way to go. In the 1980s, a Dutch bell foundry started using finite element analysis in their bell research.