Ringing the Changes: Mapping the Algorithmic Art of Change-Ringing on Church Bells

I love the sound of bells ringing out in the air. Highly structured ringing sequences were created by ordinary folk in England in the seventeenth century. Their quest was to perform all the permutations—all the different arrangements possible—of seven bells. This is a demanding task because there are 7! (7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 5040) possibilities. To ring such a peal in a church tower takes about three hours; to capture it entails writing down, or memorizing, 5040 seven-digit numbers, each one known as a change. I'm not sure why the ringers chose seven bells (not more, not less); most especially, I wonder about their desire to enact a mathematical pattern with their bodies. Ringing the Changes, a computer- generated project for print, reinaugurates this search with code and voices.

Scientific Triples, the pattern rung here, is not a peal but rather a method, a form of ringing used by contemporary ringers. By memorizing rules for generating new changes—and not every single change itself (that very long list of numbers)—method-ringers can plot their course ahead of time. Each sounded row must be unique. In the ringing world, this constraint is called truth; to repeat any row would make the performance false. A method also follows strict rules for transforming one row into the next. These rules are described at the top of the fifth page of text below, in Bell 3. The reader can check that the rules are followed by noting the position changes of the numbers from page to page. Bell 3 has been tinted blue so that its pattern of movement is easy to see.

Code for this project, written in the Python language, acts on the 5040 fixed rows of the Scientific Triples pattern. It also introduces a random element. Each bell is given twenty-three "sounds," analogous to overtones. Each sound is a voice, a short text to read, or hear, or view as a score. In any run of the code, one of these texts is randomly assigned to its bell—subject to the constraint that all twenty-three choices must be allotted before any are repeated.

Method sequences begin and end with rounds, a row in which all the bells are rung in descending order of pitch. Ringing the Changes begins with rounds (1 2 3 4 5 6 7) and is paused, by my choice, after every one of the texts for a bell has appeared seven times, which occurs after 161 pages. The 5-row (5-page) excerpt from Run 5, shown below, differs in its ordering from the 161-row (161-page) excerpt from Run 13 chosen for the printed book Ringing the Changes, forthcoming from Counterpath Press.

Each of the following authors, briefly sampled and / or paraphrased, contributes a majority of the text for one particular bell: Sha Xin Wei, Simone Weil, Sylvia Wynter, Hito Steyerl, and Yuk Hui. John C. G. Sturdy's pedagogic hints on bell ringing provide language for the bell-commenting bell. The final source is a medley or mixtape from many people including, in this excerpt, Benjamin Bratton, Aria Dean, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Fred Moten, and Emily Apter. I am deeply grateful for their words.

The rows sampled in Ringing the Changes allude to changes that need to be rung—that is, considered and heard—in our lives and communities. By permuting and realigning the texts, a generated order makes plain how concerns can be variously mapped and, thus, variously understood. By enacting the differences ordering and context make, it helps us to refuse a "canonical" order, or hierarchy, of attention, such as is normally enforced by print presentation, thereafter to be lionized and remediated as "true" or "fake."

1	Heraclitean fire (not 1 of 4 elements) is a universal agent of change of state and the mediator of exchange. Heraclitus's fire acts simultaneously upon the cosmos, the hearth, and the furnace; in other words, universe, home, and technology.
2	Why would the hurricanes seem to follow...