Wind Chimes and Music
Just about the most surprising uses of wind chimes has been as musical instruments in their own right.
This looks quite out of the question initially, as standard varieties seem to consist of just 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 abilities, whether melodic or percussive, but that has not stop some ingenious musicians from deploying them into their work.
And in fact, probably the most famous uses of one has been in one of the most popular videogames of all time.
That’s right, in a videogame.
Koji Kondo is a long-time music director at Nintendo, responsible for scoring some of the company’s biggest hits, standard-setting bestsellers such as Super Mario Bros. as well as the Legend of Zelda.
In the sequel 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 different as modern composer Oliver Messiaen and rock guitarist David Sitek.
Perhaps what’s most surprising about their use is the truth that there are already a handful of chime-like instruments available – the mark tree is even occasionally mistaken for one!
Tubular bells are another such instrument which can be 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, perhaps, none of this class of instruments look very different!
Tubular bells, however, are much more widely used out of all the chime-like instruments.
The theme for the popular animated television series “Futurama” is played with tubular bells, as was that during area of the closing credits for the renowned children’s television show “Sesame Street” in the 1980s.