Analyse sound of a bell?

Special Interest Groups
1

hi,
a bell is like a music instrument with ground tone and overtones. i want to analyze a .wav-file and get these tones in frequency. the frequencies i want to transform in note names and the difference between exact frequency of notename and real frequency in cent or, how it is mesured in germany in 16th of a halvetone.
is at least the first part possible to do with audacity? i used analyse/plot frequency and it seems not to be exact, if i control with well-known test-files…

2

The precision of Plot Spectrum improves with larger “Size” settings (more frequency bands).
(Measurement of any analogue values can never be exact.)

3

thank you for your answer!
sorry, important is for me the first part: get frequencies of overtones…

4

NB: The composition of the overtones changes as the bell-sound decays.

5

I think you’re simplifying that way too much. A bell doesn’t just start up at it’s favored tone and then slowly die out. The impact of the clapper or hammer has its own tones and characteristics—more like two pieces of dead metal smacking each other.

Then the deformed bell shape starts moving or vibrating from the impact. That’s when you get the tones you hear as the “bell sound.”

Then it dies out forever. There is no end time. You have to decide when you’re going to stop analyzing. You can’t leave it up to the bell.

All this is complicated by the impact sound being a lot louder than the bell sound—it just doesn’t last as long.

Good luck.

Koz