Heartbeats and bells

Jan 01, 2020, 11:39 AM

It's often said that the sound of a church's bells are like an auxiliary heartbeat to their local community - their individual, particular sound is unique and as identifiable as the back of one's hand. Particularly in pre-industrial times, bells were the heartbeat of the entire town in the sense that they would dictate the regularity of the day - time to wake up, time to eat, time to pray and time to retire. This piece takes that concept of the bell as the heartbeat of a community by blending those two sounds together - the bell sounds to the people of the Parisian Latin quarter, and is gradually overtaken by the sound of a heartbeat, until nothing remains of the bell and it is subsumed entirely by the body. Reimagined by Cities and Memory.