Musical Wind Chimes Being Used Everywhere
One of the most surprising uses of wind chimes has been as musical instruments in their own right.
This appears quite out of the question initially, as typical varieties appear to consist of nothing more than tinkling cylinders, with the sound only slightly different depending on whether stone, wood, metal, or glass is used.
And so it is that [wind chimes] do indeed possess only a very limited set of musical capabilities, whether melodic or percussive, but that has not stop some ingenious musicians from deploying them in their work.
And in fact, probably the most famous uses of one has been in just about the most popular videogames of all time.
That’s right, in a videogame.
Koji Kondo is a long-time audio director at Nintendo, responsible for scoring some of the company’s biggest hits, standard-setting bestsellers such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.
In the follow up Super Mario World, wind chimes figure rather conspicuously in the theme for the “Vanilla Dome” game level (or “world,” in the parlance of the Mario games).
Chimes have also been featured in the works of musicians as varied as modern composer Oliver Messiaen and rock guitarist David Sitek.
Maybe what’s most amazing about their use is the fact that there are already a handful of chime-like instruments available – the mark tree is even sometimes mistaken for one!
Tubular bells are another such instrument that are often mistaken for wind chimes.
Yet such misconceptions by casual observers can be easily forgiven, given that one cylinder can only so different from another, even when on an altogether different instrument – and, probably, none of this class of instruments look different!
Tubular bells, however, are much more widely used out of all the chime-like instruments.
The theme for the well-liked animated television series “Futurama” is played with tubular bells, as was that during section of the closing credits for the famous children’s television show “Sesame Street” during the 1980s.