About wind chimes

People have hung things in the wind to make music for thousands of years: shells, bones, bamboo, stones and, later, bronze and glass.

Bells in the eaves

In ancient China, bronze bells hung from the corners of temple and pagoda roofs, and their ringing was thought to keep harm away. The idea travelled to Japan, where glass wind bells called fūrin still ring on summer porches; people say their sound makes a hot day feel cooler. In Bali, bamboo chimes and clappers sing in the rice fields, and in many coastal places people string shells together and hang them by the door.

Why long tubes sound low

A metal tube rings at a pitch set by its length. Make the tube twice as long and its note drops by two octaves, because the pitch goes with one over the length squared. So to make a set of chimes play a scale, the tubes are cut to carefully worked-out lengths, longest for the lowest note. Look at the chimes in this garden: the long ones are the low notes.

A tube's ring isn't one pure note. It has several notes at once, called partials, and in a hanging tube they aren't evenly spaced the way they are in a flute or a violin string. That's what gives chimes their shimmering, bell-like sound. The game builds each sound from those same partials.

The moods

• Sunny and Moonlight use five-note pentatonic scales, found in folk music all over the world. Any notes from them sound good together, so the wind can never play a wrong note.
• Temple uses the in scale from Japan, which has a quiet, thoughtful sound.
• Starry has a raised fourth note, which gives it a floating, open feeling.

Playing without sight

The whole toy is sound, so it plays just as well with your eyes closed. Each chime has a button your screen reader can find, from lowest to highest. On a keyboard, the number keys ring them. The wind slider is labelled with words, from still to gusty.

Made for Stellar Whiskers.