CAN YOU CALL A TOUCH

Emily Roderick

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Introduction

Nina Davies

You're listening to Future Artefacts FM , a bi-monthly podcast/broadcast featuring speculative fiction audio works by artists and writers produced and presented by Nina Davies,

Rebecca Edwards

Niamh Schmidtke

and Niamh Schmidtke, on RTM

and also available on podcast channels.

The programme focuses on fictional works intended for broadcast to carve out a better understanding of the now by exploring various interpretations of the future.

Together with guests we discuss the mechanics of different types of storytelling to reveal the complexities of contemporary culture. Let’s get started.

All

Let’s get started.

Artist Introduction

Welcome back, everyone, to Future Artefacts FM. As per usual, I'm your host, Nina Davies.

I'm Rebecca Edwards.

And I'm Niamh Schmidtke. Welcome to episode 33.

Today, we have the wonderful Emily Roderick with us today. How are you, Emily?

Hello, I'm good, thank you.

Happy to be here.

Yeah, you're in town from Berlin, so we managed to catch you just in the right time, which is good. I mean, we designed it this way, but.

This was scheduled many months in advance.

Yeah, we just happened to call you as you came off the flight. Just to introduce Emily for anyone who doesn't know of her already, Emily Roderick is an artist, producer, and facilitator teetering between the serious and the silly. Based in Berlin, her creative and often collaborative outputs include performance, film, workshops, walks, and writing.

Curiosity and questions drive her practice across its different lines of inquiry, exploring social space and interaction with non-art audiences and community contexts, using art to create conversation and exchange. Removing barriers to the arts is also a big part of her production work, with a focus on developing accessible and inclusive projects. And actually, this isn't our first time officially working with you.

You did help us, I think it was like... 2022? 2022 with some accessibility work we were doing with making our website screen reader compatible.

And you introduced us to the amazing Ian, who we've never spoken about on the show, but is amazing.

“Ian Rattray is...

Big up Ian.

He's great.

If you're listening, we love you.

Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, so Emily, you're going to be presenting across different points of the podcast, your work, well, sort of fragments and snippets from a larger body of work called Can You Call A Touch? And we'll get more into that, but I was wondering if there's anything else you want to kind of elaborate on that and tell us a bit more about what it is.

I mean, yeah, I guess for a bit of an introduction, the Can You Call A Touch project is a project that explores bell ringing both from kind of my experience as a bell ringer and also as an artist. So it's a very sort of long term research project that I've been working on. And I've been both analyzing it from my experience as a bell ringer and then now, in more recent years, come back to it as an artist and very much trying to create those sort of connections and understand bell ringing in a different way.

So that's kind of, I guess, a bit of an introduction to what it was and where I'm going. But we've got time to go through this.

Yeah, I know. What stage do you feel like you are, that we're kind of catching you in this project?

True. So Can You Call A Touch is now at the point where I'm about to sort of springboard into the next stage of it. So it started really through a DYCP that I got from Arts Council.

Thank you Arts Council England. Thank you, thank you. That was a year long time for me to kind of pick apart what I wanted to research and build upon and actually think about the outputs of what that could be creatively.

So I've kind of got that DYCP under my belt. I've got a lot of the thoughts and thinking and research done and now it's kind of at that sort of turning point really that I'm gathering more of the creative outputs and thinking, okay, what can I do with this now?

Okay, so we're kind of like, you know, we're kind of metaphorically in you. Like, in you.

So, all conversations in the radio show are completely consensual, FYI.

What I meant to say is, so metaphorically, we're sort of like with you in your studio right now, kind of looking at sort of fragments of some of your research. Rather than a sort of like radio play or.

Yeah.

I don't have necessarily something finished at this point.

Yeah.

It's fragments from recordings and interviews that I've done so far. Yeah.

NS
And we're excited because this is also the last episode of our As a Chorus mini-series. So, we've spoken before, I featured some work in the first episode and then we had Most Dismal Swamp in our second and most recently we had Rhys Morgan. And so, Emily, you make up the quartet. If we're going to be continuing with the kind of singing metaphor. So, as a reminder for anyone who might not have listened to the previous episodes, As a Chorus is, how does singing tell a story?

How are our bodies intrinsic to the expression of pitch, tone or duration of a note? How do individual voices dissipate into a group of singers, the volume rising from a crowd of chanters or the controlled unison of trained harmonies in a choir?

As a Chorus points to the group of people who may sing these songs together and the impact the repetition has on its listeners. Singing together has long been used as a tool for synchronization in workspaces, from sea chanters that coordinated sailors movements to field songs that kept laborers in rhythm.

And we'll be talking a bit more in the episode as well about bell ringing as a form of timekeeping and kind of the histories that are intrinsic to that and what types of roles that might have in contemporary societies.

And to finish off, these occupational songs don't just pass the time, they harness the physical power of music to move ships, shape tasks and unify collective effort, which I think is really kind of a core of a lot of the research you've been doing in terms of bell ringing as a community and a collective and a group of people and specifically about your family really, but also what does that group of people signify for the communities that they kind of support through the sounds that they make?

So before we get on to chatting, we're gonna hear two recordings that will last about five minutes.

One of them includes bells being rung or upbringing.

Yeah, I should maybe correct you on, oh yeah, because what's written here is bell upbringing. It's the ringing up of the bells. So when you go into the tower, so the way that the bells are hung and installed in a bell tower, now it's that the bell is on one large wheel so that the bell is facing downwards most of the time. And then when you want to go and ring the bell, you have to keep pulling the rope so that you're swinging the bell until it swings enough that it then goes upside down and is resting there so that the bell is up, as we'd say.

So we need to ring the bell up into the position so that then it can be rung in the way that us ringers would do. So that's the kind of technical term, I guess.

And the ringing up is like part of the way that you would hear bells. It's not like the prep work. It's part of the actual...

I mean, maybe some bell ringers would say it's not necessarily the important part to hear.

But for me, I find it quite nice to hear that as part of the full soundscape of the bells because it also is a different sort of technique in the beginning and you can hear the bells individually and yeah.

There's no backstage with bell ringing. I mean, there is in terms of the bell tower, but there's no backstage in terms of like you can't hide the sound.

No, yeah.

You have to...

Everyone's gonna hear it. Yeah.

I'm thinking even when you see an orchestra live and there's the moment where they're all kind of poised and they kind of tune almost or they get to the moment where it's like now we're sinking.

Yes. Yeah, true. That's a really nice way to think about it actually.

Yeah, we're getting ready, preparing ourselves for the actual ringing.

Just like this intro.

Yeah.

Which we should bring the intro to the end and I think we should get into the work.

See you back here in five.

Yeah, see you back here in five.

Work: Can You Call a Touch

Bye. Here's one.

No, just about.

Right, shall we start with some, round some call changes, so you get a similar?

Yeah, I think so.

We don't often talk about being a ringer.

No.

Much, apart, except to other ringers. It's very much a secret society without, in all but name.

Secret or nerdy?

So I'm a Tower Captain, which is a bit of a strange title in itself.

Yes.

And I am responsible for basically making sure that as often as possible, the bells are rung for church services and the practice night that we have on Thursday.

And I, you know, trying to bring people on as far as they want to go within the constraints of a five bell tower.

And that's it really, isn't it? I mean, by and large.

Yes, I mean, you're a go between with the church, aren't you?

Yes, absolutely.

And if we're going to ring at a non-standard time.

Yeah, we get permission from the incumbent, Martin.

Yeah, but I will say, I was going to say, you put messages out on the Village Facebook group, so that people know why we're ringing at a strange time, which is good because sometimes you get a dialogue with people saying how much they enjoyed hearing

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good thing.

Okay.

So my role in the tower is steeple keeper, which is another strange term. We don't have a... We have a tower, not a steeple.

But it refers to the fact that someone has to be responsible for looking at the... Looking after the bells, looking at the church fabric.

So going up into the bell chamber to look and make sure that everything is sound condition, it's safe to ring, that we get maintenance work done when we need it.

Yeah, and just, you know, repairs and renewals, as happens with any mechanical thing, things wear out and have to be dealt with. So, so that's it. So that's my responsibility.

Conversation

Welcome back, and those were the first three segments of Can You Call A Touch by Emily Roderick, which began with the ringing up of the bells and two audio clips in a sort of interview format, one about a secret society and the second bit about the roles in the bell tower. Emily, just to kick us off, could you start by introducing the project and telling us how it began and what first drew you to bell ringing as a subject?

So, it's, and actually I've made a lot of notes to try and like get through how I started with this, because interestingly, I realize now that the project actually started through conversations with friends of mine, non-ringers, during the lockdown, because people had to meet.

Yeah, and ringing your inner circle in a small room, we call it the ringing chamber.

And yeah, obviously with social distancing, you couldn't do that. So, there was a big shift in the community specifically, and at the time I was already ringing occasionally, not so often in London at various towers.

So, it came out of discussions with friends of mine who hadn't come across bell ringing before, or only heard of it through me and my experience of ringing.

I think to sort of echo what my mum was saying about the sucre society, because a lot of the time, I'm really not talking to non-ringers about bell ringing, which is, and we can kind of go into that in a bit, but it's, yeah, it started through these conversations, I think, particularly because I was so interested in bell ringing in the sense of, it's something that I've always been a part of. My parents taught me how to ring when I was about 12, 13. My parents have been ringing since they met at university. That's where they met. They met through bell ringing.

That's where my sister and her husband met, is through bell ringing. And so it's been a very sort of normal kind of pastime, I guess, hobby for me to do. And then obviously moving to London to study fine art, it then was like a moment for me to step back from that. I didn't ring for a while and slowly return to it when I was missing that sort of community. I was missing that. Also the intergenerational space that it was making for me was really nice. And I think because it was suddenly removed from my day to day, it was like, okay, I need to do something with this. I need to really sort of put a different pair of glasses on almost and look at it in a different way and go why am I so interested in bell ringing? Especially seeing it as this very curious, creative, very performative action as well. And something that a lot of people don't know about, particularly the ringers themselves. And because, I mean, you don't see the bell ringers. You only hear, like day to day, you just hear the bells.

So like really I wanted to kind of open that door and show a bit of what that community does and how, also the rich history of it, I think as well, that that's really, yeah, through those conversations with people that aren't from that community was.

There's something interesting in what you're saying as well where, you know, obviously it's existed in your family for quite a long time, even so many connections in your family are through this community.

I'm wondering then as you're translating that into kind of an artistic project, how do you see your role in this project, both, I guess, as the interviewer in the clips that we're listening to today, but maybe also more generally that kind of world?

A lot of it came from having conversations with people that don't know about bell ringing and feeling like I'm the one bridging that gap in terms of, also because when I'm talking to people that aren't from the bell ringing community, there's a lot of preconceptions maybe that come with that. And I'm in some ways also trying to flip that because I talk about bell ringing and people think, oh, I'm an avid Christian that's going to church every week and that it's very much a religious practice and therefore there's a different sort of sensitivity then to the hobby to the act of bell ringing. And in that way, I feel like I'm there to sort of open it up a bit and say, no, actually, there's so much to this community that people don't know about. I mean, because people didn't necessarily know that there were any ringers ringing in the tower at all.

So I feel like it's a community that's not known about enough in maybe in the sense that I feel like with a lot most of the work that I do in any of the projects I've done in the past, I do feel like I take on that sort of role of opening up

Yeah, this brings me on to, because I think we should say in the interview recording, it's your parents that we're hearing speaking. I don't actually know if we've made that apparent. Your mum in one of the clips described spell-wringing as feeling a bit like a secret society, so adding to this feeling of not really knowing what it is, it's a bit magical. I guess I'm wondering, you've said that you feel this culture, but as you're going through this project, do you feel like that's still a part of it for you? Do you feel like this kind of secret society, the ringers talk to the ringers? Or...

Kind of, yeah.

I mean, because at the same time, I'm also conducting interviews with ringers and talking about their experience as a ringer, very specifically, rather than... I'm not asking ringers about the sort of creative output and what it is as an artist, because I'm also really fascinated by ringers that are really involved in this community and what that means to them.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of very specialized terminology as well that I don't think we're going to have a lot of time to get into, but I just wanted to bring up a couple of examples.

Plain Bob.

Don't know what a plain bob is, but I love the sound of it.

Plain Bob is a method, a specific method. Yeah, so it's the tune, as it were, that's being played, and that's sort of entry-level method, and I feel like I should know why it's a plain method.

It's a rookie.

It's for rookies. Yeah, I think the first one that you learn, when you're done with what we say is rounds and call changes, which is just ringing from the highest pitch to the lowest pitch bell, you're ringing in rounds because you're just going, da da da da da da da da, and then the conductor, who's the main person that's calling all of these different tunes, methods and things, they would then swap the bell order and say two to three, so the two and the second and third bell swap order and this sort of thing.

But yeah, there's a lot of very quirky names of methods and even a lot of the terminology is very specific and I think that's, I find that language really interesting when it comes to bell ringing. Because it is so, yeah,

I think it really feeds into

I'm surprised it's not all over TikTok as like a kind of like book talk, like ring talk.

That would be amazing.

You could start that.

I don't know if that's just like my brain rotted brain thinking out. But I feel like if it's not there already, it should be. It feels very much within that language.

Isn't that like a whole thing of like girlies taking up Catholicism is like an ironic thing.

And like I'm like wondering whether we might start seeing like, I don't know, like bros or girlies like taking up bell ringing is like a kind of ironic thing, but also like also very sincerely as well. I would like, I could really see that.

Yeah, I think I've heard of people talk about bell ringing, like queer people trying to find another really specific subsect of some kind of hobby that they can have with a very specific group of people.

And they've spoken about bell ringing and not necessarily church bells, but also like ringing smaller bells.

Yeah.

And I can, and I think we spoke about this a little bit in Reese's episode as well, kind of a more general interest towards folklore and tradition, which in some ways makes sense because kind of the contemporary moment is moving so fast that there's a desire towards what are the things that historically we know and understand. And even when you're talking about these names, it's like where that name come from that has a whole mythology about it that has kind of a grounding and a decision-making process with the group of bell ringers. Like I'm wondering the day that term was first coined. Did they look around at one another and go like, yeah, plainbob?

Yeah.

But I think also in terms of like going back almost right to the beginning of the kind of first question or your

first answer of saying that the bell ringing is a sort of dying art form.

Like what, I mean, I was kind of thinking about like, what happens if it did become a dying art form? And like, I kind of am thinking about all the sort of possibilities of what people would think these bells are.

We think about like the Liberty Bell has become like a monument. Would these things become monuments? Or we think about like, we look at old jobs that would have existed in medieval times.

I can't think of an example right now. And we know, we probably all had that. We were like, a what?

Like, what did they do?

Well, I'm even thinking in ancient Greece, they would have whalers. They'd have specific people who would kind of scream and wail through the streets at a funeral procession.

Right.

To kind of embody the grief of everyone around. I mean, in Ireland, there's like keening, which is like this kind of grief singing as well. But those roles don't exist anymore.

Yeah.

Or not like, widely.

In a weird way, it's kind of almost amazing that bell ringing has like, lasted so long.

Already when like, at a moment where you're saying like, bell ringing is a dying art form, we're also at a point where like, a bank teller is also becoming like a dying role, dying role or cashier, we still have cashiers.

But like, like it's sort of like this weird thing where like, that's such an old practice. Not to say that it should have died, that's not what I'm saying. But it's kind of like this interesting kind of like, lining up of totally different timelines.

Maybe also, I think to be also nice to the bell ringing community, I think perhaps me saying it's a dying art form is perhaps a bit strong, maybe.

And I think just for the context.

It's very much alive.

Yeah, absolutely.

And yeah, there's still so much going on. But I think in the sense of things like we've got bell foundries that are closing, or have closed.

I mean, we've got one left in the UK, in Loughborough, which actually has had a lot of funding and redevelopment in recent years in order to keep it going. And I think it's such an important part of the history and the knowledge around making bells, because it's not just about casting the metal bell itself.

It's about fixing and...

Yeah, exactly. It's also about making the ropes, making the wheels that they're hung on, making the metal frames that all of the bells are then arranged in, that are then put in the tower.

Yeah, it's not just like one label stuff you can buy. It has to be very specific custom.

Exactly. And I think that also, you know, bells are made to last. That's the thing. Bells last a really long time. So also, you know, we're not exactly making the same amount of bells that we used to historically. And so I think just in that sense, it's the amount of bells that are being made.

That sort of side of things is reducing. But at the same time, the community is still very much there, alive and kicking. I know people that have learnt to ring in the last couple of years and are like, yeah, I'm going to keep going.

And you know, all of this.

But yeah, I think what maybe I'm trying to say is that it's a very interesting time for bell ringing in that sense of, I feel like the places like the Central Council of Bell Ringers, you know, they're really in a sort of transformative moment of, okay, what do we do to keep this going? And how do we change and sort of, yeah, listen to the younger generation because there is such a intergenerational split, well, not generational split, it's such an intergenerational thing that I'm so often in a room where there's people younger than me all the way up to in 80s, 90s. And that's something that I really love about it.

But yeah, now it's like, okay, what does the younger generation think about bell ringing and how can they carry it on and take it forward?

Yeah, what does it mean for our generation to be a bell ringer? Because it would mean something different for every generation.

Well, hold that thought because our next question is around that. But before we get to that, we're going to play some more.

Yeah, exactly. So we've got two more clips, which we will be playing back to back. And they're about one minute and 30 seconds each.

So we'll see you back in three minutes.

Work: Can You Call a Touch

You've been to various churches with us, not so many, but often the entrance to the tower is a secret spot almost. A door that you might not notice unless you were looking for it. And things like that.

And sometimes a little bit, look a little bit, Alice in Wonderland, like that day, you know, because it's a little door and then round this spiral staircase, mostly.

I mean, ours, your experience at Bishops is where you're open to the churches is still relatively rare, isn't it? But it's these stairs that sometimes feature the indentations of people's footsteps for hundreds of years.

Yeah.

You know, they're worn in that particular way. And that's that fascinating thing that you slowly become aware of, that you are messing with stuff that's hundreds of years old sometimes.

Very true.

I still get excited at new spiral staircases actually. And sometimes on the way up, you pass little doors that look like they haven't been opened for 100 years.

Yeah. I always want to know what's in there. But they're locked to stop you looking in.

Obviously, there's always some disquiet about ringing when you live next door too.

And they are quite loud here.

Yeah.

I've got a couple of anecdotal things about restarting the bells. This is a story that Martin tells. And he was visiting a parishioner, he's the vicar.

He was visiting a parishioner at the other end of the village, who was not well. But he, and they were commenting on the bells. And she said to him, it's like the village has got its voice back.

So isn't that lovely? And I think there is that background sound in, you know, particularly on a Sunday morning across England, that this is the background of people's lives.

And recently, I saw a Facebook post about somebody that had listened to a conversation on the radio, right? So it's all a bit for a fan who phoned her mother on a Sunday morning so that she could hear the bells and be taken back. Yeah.

And they were, I don't think they were ringers, it was...

Yeah.

Just, you know, that sort of background sound to your life, basically.

Conversation

Okay, welcome back to the second part of this conversation. We have just listened to two clips from Can You Call A Touch by Emily Roderick.

Emily, I really like the little sound bit where your mum refers to someone as getting the village, the village having its voice back.

I think it's probably like one of the, I think it's one of the most poetic parts in the sort of series of clips that you've selected.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think also personally in that, for kind of context of when my parents taught me to ring, it was because the bells in our village hadn't been rung for quite a long time because they were deemed unsafe to ring. So for a long time, they were just left silent and they went through a recruitment drive basically to get bell ringers ready to ring the bells when they were actually ringable again.

And so it was like, yes, we're going to get our children to do this as well. And it makes sense. But yes, they're really hearing that.

And it just really struck a chord when she said it. And I just thought, oh my God, of course.

That's completely right.

Yeah. And it's funny because also, especially as a voice, I recognize our village bells specifically. If I hear them on a recording, I know that that is our set of bells.

That's crazy.

And if I, because I would go through, when I was finding the recordings for this and I'm going through and I've got recordings from many different towers and I didn't label them, I just called them bells, which is very stupid.

But I was listening back through and I'm labeling them again because I'm like, I know which one is which.

And so even that sort of recognition of actually like the location and those specific bells in that specific place, I think is something that really hit me in a way that I didn't think about it before. Because as well now, I also still, I mean, I don't live in the UK, but I live very close, very close to a bell tower where I am now.

And obviously I recognize those bells, but it's a different sort of relationship because I know that there aren't people behind those bells also.

Because in Germany, they don't, you have kind of Carolyn setups, I think is what you call it, where it's one person playing multiple bells, either by like a keyboard type scenario that are connected to the bells and they just hit them instead.

It's not, yeah, the bell ringing that I'm really looking at here in the UK and this history is English change ringing. And it's very specific to the UK. And some towers in the US will ring that way. And also in Australia, but otherwise it's not the same. Yeah, yeah. So it's also that of the voice, but also knowing the people that are there.

Like, yeah, yeah, it's really, yeah, I love that.

Yeah, I'm also thinking about how the specific architecture of those bell towers will affect kind of the vibration and the echo and even the density of the town or the village around it as well, in terms of making up these very specific relationships to a place through sound, in terms of you'll walk through certain towns and they'll be really, really loud because the streets are really wide. So there's nowhere for the sound to be absorbed into, whether it's other places when the streets are really narrow, there's more kind of just built stuff that's housing that vibration. So I'd also imagine even there's the recording in the tower, but even as you're walking around the bell tower to kind of, oh, how does that mediate outwards?

You're talking to us before about different ringing towers that are in London and how, based on how loud the city is, you actually can't hear them. You need to be really, really close before you can hear it.

But if you're somewhere rural, it'll spread.

In Warwickshire, where my parents are based, even I know that there's a bell tower in the next village, which isn't that far away. If the wind travels in the right way, you can hear their bells on the other day of the week. And I'm very curious about that sort of sound travel. And in a way, it's like, you know, the villages are communicating in a way, and sort of having that exchange. And I think that's probably historically part of that, you know, being able to hear from the next village, you know, not in a big built up city, but yeah, it's really interesting.

Bells have historically been used to mark time and call people to gatherings or signal events, like celebrations and mourning.

How do you think about bell ringing as a kind of public voice for a place? And do you see bell ringing as a kind of sonic language? I mean, I feel like we're kind of already kind of moving towards that.

I mean, we're sort of talking about, I guess a village language, but also it is, yeah, like how it kind of functions, I guess.

It's interesting because I feel in some way, because I've just written on my piece of paper, but I'm split on this because I think historically, yes, I feel like it has this sort of public voice and it had much more of a sort of part of society, like in the sense of, I think more people would rely on the bells or it was more, there was perhaps more of a knowledge around, oh, they're ringing today because so and so is getting married in the church or there's been a funeral and they're tolling the bell for this person. So even that sort of kind of overarching knowledge of what's going on and you know, the bells are kind of communicating that. I don't know if they still hold that today in the same way.

And that's something that really made me sort of sit back and go huh, I'm curious what in terms of that sort of public voice, is if they still carry that significance in the same way. I don't know.

I guess my relationship with with bell ringing and is in terms of it's more the sound of bells rather than the specific technique that you're talking about is the Angeles because anyone who's grown up in Ireland will will know the sound of it.

But even hearing right before usually there's the news or it comes right after. And depending on what's happening, if there's like breaking news or there's some accident on the motorway, they'll be talking about that, and then they'll say, oh, and now we need to pause for the Angelus or we're really sorry that the Angelus was a minute late because this interview extended. And there's like quite a lot of reverence around it, sometimes controversially, but usually not. And but in terms of that, that that is a rhythm of like all Irish national broadcasting, whether it be on TV, but mostly on radio.

And that's why I'm thinking the way you're talking about it, it's this occasion, it's this very joyful thing. And it's not, it's attached to an event rather than a faith based thing.

I think also because perhaps we're, you've got also the timekeeping aspect, which isn't really human bell ringing lead. And you, because that's normally the clock bell. Exactly.

The clock bell is mechanized. And so, yeah, because also, yeah, when you go into ring, you have to unhook the clock mechanism before you start ringing. Because the clock mechanism is normally attached to one of those bells in the tower.

So those same bells also operate as a sort of clock-like bell.

Not in every tower, obviously.

But yeah, so a lot of the time it's like, oh, we've all finished ringing, now we need to reconnect the clock mechanism before we leave, kind of thing. Because, yeah, the clock...

It's like a weird human intervention of like, unhooking the clock.

In terms of that sort of public voice, I mean, I do find that I use the local bells more as a sort of timekeeper, or a moment for me to...

Because where I live, the bells ring, I think, at like, quarter to six, or something like this, and that's like the perfect time to remind me to be like, okay, we're nearing the end of the workday, let's take a moment.

And it's always in earshot, and it's always this sort of moment of, oh yeah, okay, like tempo change, because I don't wear a watch, and I try not to look at the clock too much.

Since we knew that we were going to have you on, I've been thinking, I've actually been quite sad, because I don't hear bells.

I don't, in London, I just don't, and there are so many churches, you showed us this amazing map, which shows us all the churches, in dark skies, yeah. Yeah, with bells. And I've been trying to listen out for them, and I can't hear them.

And it made me feel really sad, because it kind of links into this idea of it becoming this lost intergenerational archive, essentially. But also, it made me think of what is the modern day? Bell ringing, and it's literally notifications, isn't it?

You know, pre-digital communication, bell ringing, now we have like notifications, or, I mean, I don't know, maybe there's something else, maybe that's a bit too glib to say that.

But it just made me sad, because I live in Ladywell next to, I just outed myself, I live near a really beautiful church that has bells, and I've not once heard them ring.

Sometimes you'll have towers that just don't ring, if they don't have enough people, or maybe there's maintenance that needs to be done, but particularly in London or built up areas, you'll have churches that you can stand outside, and you know that they're ringing, you know that it's happening right now, and you still can't really hear it, which is really interesting. So then, yeah, it's only if you're actually in the tower, and you're the ones ringing, that you can hear the bells, feel the bells also, because a lot of it is like that resonance in the room is, oh, it's powerful. So yeah, I think, and that's something in that sort of spilling out of the community is interesting because a lot of the time, as bell ringers, we find that you've got communities that also find it really hard to live near bells if they're really loud, because they can be really loud. So yeah.

What are the kind of reasons for bell ringers to ring bells? Is it for funerals, weddings, and Sundays mass?

I was going to ask, are people getting married less as well, which would then also mean, or are people going to registry offices more than they are going to a church, which would be another reason why we don't hear bells?

That's a good point. Yeah. So those three that you mentioned are, I would say, the main reasons that people would ring the bells.

And yeah, I do get the sense that less people are getting married in churches. But also then you do have the other side of the ringing community, where I mentioned about peal boards in the ringing room.

You can also just organize either a court appeal or appeal, which is to do, it's connected to the amount of changes in the order of the bells. It's to do with permutations and mathematics, which I won't go into now.

I was actually going to bring that up. I think that's incredible, but we can talk about that.

When you ring a peal, a peal is three hours long.

Oh, OK.

And you can't stop. You have to ring the whole time.

Wow. So you're sore the next day.

Yeah, yeah. And I've never rung a peal, so I've only done a quarter peal. And a quarter peal is about 45 minutes.

But even that's very long. It's very meditative. Also, you really kind of just get sucked into this hum and you're just ringing and you just keep going.

But for things like that, you can dedicate it to anything, to be honest.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, and that's also something that's quite fun about it, because also you register these events, the appeals that you ring, and you register them on a big database.

So people would be like, oh, this is the first court appeal where everyone was under 25 when they rang it, or this was someone's birthday because we want to just celebrate this person's birthday.

Do you think this project could end up result in appeal?

That would be good. I'm scared. The thought of me standing, ringing for three hours is a lot.

But that is a goal. Yeah, that's a good goal to have. And yeah, because I'm interested in this sort of dedication and what people want to celebrate also because I think that's changing.

I'm even more so recently, I've had friends who have come out of really long relationships and then they've celebrated or they've marked time past on leaving that relationship.

Breakups.

Yeah.

Divorce party.

But I'm thinking like a divorce and stuff as well.

Yeah, a divorce party. Yeah.

It's a big thing now. But I'm wondering about like what are, a tolling bell for a divorce. We were talking about like graduations and people doing PhDs before.

It's like, yeah, I mean, if I finished a series of studies that long, I would want some bells to ring for me. Yeah. Thinking about what are those things that we would mark or celebrate or the birth of a child.

Yeah, that's also quite common, I would say.

But then that starts to feel more like the bullet journal, girly wellness vibe where it's like, I'm grateful for the soft sheet on my bed.

Or do bell towers maybe get installed in new kinds of spaces?

What if a bell tower was installed in a court and it was like, the jury has reached their verdict and then we're-

That's right.

We're moving.

Yeah. So like, right, we record in TACO in Abbey Wood and, I mean, Abbey Wood's going through a major regeneration. I haven't checked.

No, you checked. There's no-

No, the closest tower is either in Aerith and they've got two and one isn't ringable right now, I think. Otherwise you're in the Isle of Dogs, which actually is like quite far, I'd say.

So maybe there's something about also as different areas of London get built up, there's this bell tower in terms of, because quite often these regenerated spaces, I mean, I use regeneration and inverted commas because Thamesmead and Abbey Wood already had quite a vibrant community here before this new development around ways to bring community together, in terms of a marker of time that we can collectively celebrate or kind of recognize or even, oh, did you hear the bells today? They rung extra well. I don't know how that would be as an audience, like a listener of it.

In gaming, it's quite a big thing there. Like Stardew Valley, I'm sure there's a level where you have to ring the bells in a certain way. Like there are like mini games within that.

Oh, I need to find this.

To bring it back to the cultural value of bells, I just want to kind of talk a little bit about some really weird stories that I found about the history of bell ringing or within the history of bell ringing.

So the theft of particular bells in Withensee in 2021, which no one noticed that they were stolen until they didn't ring, which is kind of interesting.

Or during World War II, British church bells were ordered not to ring at all as a kind of safety precaution. The only circumstance in which they could ring was if Germany invaded Britain. So this is kind of like a national alarm system.

And then also people burying bells in fields during the English Civil War to stop them from being melted for weapons.

So I'm kind of wondering like and as well like these early 17th century scientists that basically studied change ringing as an example of permutation theory. So it's very much linked to mathematics.

I mean, I also don't know about math, but I just saw this and was like, that's incredible that that's linked to something so fundamental in mathematics now.

What is permutation theory?

Sorry, do not want me to ask the question. What I understood was that these scientists were using ringing to generate permutations or different possible orders or sequences of a set of bells.

So each ringer was controlling a bell, following a set of rules that gradually rearrange the order, which then produce unique sequences. So it's kind of like an algorithm as well. So it's algorithmic music almost.

And also just to interject with that, the sheet music, as I'd say, the methods, how they're drawn, is just beautiful.

And for me, it looks very much like code in a way, and how it's designed. I don't know if I have anything here. I'll find some links and a nice database where people can find them online.

We'll link it to the credits of the episode for anyone who wants to see the visual.

But yeah, so I guess I was just kind of wondering what these weird stories tell us about the cultural value that people place on to bells, you know.

How that's changed from World War II, where people were kind of, or the Civil War, where they were burying them so that they didn't get melted, to now, people not noticing that they'd even been stolen until they didn't ring for a service.

Like, also, yeah, this, the lost bell foundries. You know, we were talking about Whitechapel before.

I think, I wanted to add, especially to the, when you were talking about burying the bells, what I also found out recently, in the same vein of not wanting the bells to be melted down for weapons, basically, that if, this was specifically in Austria, actually, but I saw about bell funerals, and the fact that if the bells had to be removed to be melted down, that they would take them down and dress them, and put florals on them and this sort of thing, as they were taken away to then be melted

To the heart, the heart of the, yeah.

But I'm even thinking also about this kind of this family dynamic that you have with the bells, and also thinking about bell ringing historically as being something that would be passed down from generation to generation.

So also if a bell is being taken away, it is also like an extension of maybe a family tie, for example. You know, there's a much more, you know, oh, I rang this bell, my parent rang this bell, my grandparent rang the bell.

And I'm assuming much more generations farther past, especially if it's like a church from the 1700s. And then in the 1900s, it gets, it gets stolen. You know, that there's something about that time keeping of the material of the bell itself.

Like I was quite struck when you're talking about upbringing, or ringing up at the beginning of the episode, the sheer physicality of the sound and like imagining that, imagining being in the tower as you are ringing as well.

And kind of even just as a, as a viewer rather than as someone who's actively participating, you know, and thinking about how many generations of people have done this before, kind of that deep connection to place through sound.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's very, very nice. And I think that the, it's maybe an interesting little like sound tip thing is that with the, with the ringing up that we've already listened to, that was me recording, maybe it wasn't me, it wasn't me, I was there.

The ringing up recording was actually done in the ringing chamber where, where all of the ringers were. So you can also hear like a bit of the rattle of the ropes as they go up and down through the ceiling, basically.

And that has a different richness of sound to, for example, the clip that we're going to listen to later, which is in the belfry. And the belfry is where the bells are, so you're much closer to the bells.

And you haven't got the voices of the people, but then you've got this really powerful like hum of the bells that, yeah. For a long time, I wouldn't ring up or down. I would just ring in the middle when I'm still learning.

And yeah, as you're saying about kind of witnessing that and feeling that sort of embodied, like, what? Like, I don't know how to describe it, but it's really, yeah.

Well, I think maybe this is a good time to ring down this episode with our final clip.

But before we listen to the ringing down, which will play us out of the episode, we want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for having me. It's great.

Is there anything that you kind of want to plug or any kind of updates on how people can, like, keep in the loop with this project?

That's a good point. I mean, I would love anyone that's interested to reach out to me and they can email me probably the best ways to go to my website, emilyroderick.com, and find me there.

Just because I think this project deserves more voice, more voices and more community to talk about this.

Are you also interested in meeting more bell ringers? So if there's any bell ringers listening to this, get in touch.

Come on down. If you want to learn, come on down. But yeah, and I think just I'm excited to see where this project goes because it's sort of at this next stage where now I need to make some work and get it out there. And yeah, think about what those sort of public outputs could be now because I've done the hard work of doing a lot of interviews and research and now it's go time.

So yeah, exactly. We're just we're right at the right at the kickoff.

Yeah. OK, so to ring us out, you're ringing us out.

Yeah. OK, so this is my whole family, actually. So this is my mom, dad, sister, my brother-in-law and me on our hometown, hometown bell tower where both me and my sister learnt to ring.

Wow, very special.

OK, well, we'll leave you with that. But yeah, thank you so much. And we'll see everybody soon.

We'll see everyone soon.

Thank you.

Bye.

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