Nobody told the familiar bells of Graham Chapel the new rules of Daylight Savings Time, subtlety hinting at a few secrets the Chapel still holds.

The Chapel’s seemingly ancient clock and chimes are actually a modern computer-controlled atomic clock, called a Carrilon. It is kept in sync with the national atomic clock in Boulder, Colo., but DST changes are all programmed into the computer. Time ‘springs forward’ an hour the first Sunday of April, or did until last year. Problem is, nobody told the clock.

Time changed on March 9th this year but Events Services, the University department tasked to maintain the clock, did not realize until informed by Student Life last week.

To be fair, odds are that they would never hear it. The chimes are turned off for every event.

“When you’re in the chapel and there’s an event and [the chimes] go off, you can hear it, so if there’s any kind of event we turn it off. When we’re up and running, there’s also at least seven students who rehearse organ in there, so we shut it off for their rehearsals,” said Sue Nickrent, director of Events Services. “It’s only on from 6 a.m. to midnight, so there may only be five hours you hear it because there are so many events in Graham.”

The chimes can be heard in Chapel because they’re real chimes, tucked away at the top of one of the spires. A microphone picks up the chimes and broadcasts them through speakers on the spire. The mechanical ringer is controlled by the Carrilon atomic clock, nestled amongst the organ’s real pipes.

“The pipes you see on the stage of Graham are only decorative pipes. The actual real organ pipes are behind the woodwork in Graham,” said Nickrent. “You have to go into this really dark dismal place and sit on the ground to program the Carrilon.”

The clock is currently chiming the correct time, but it’s a stop-gap fix. Events Services, specifically Shannon Greenwell-Wright, event coordinator, has until the first Sunday of April to figure out how to solve it permanently.

“We did fix it, but we just changed [the time],” said Greenwell-Wright. “We have to call to see if they can completely reset it because it’s going to change back into the wrong time [once April rolls around].”

The service company, Maas-Rowe, is located in California, so they may not be so quick to fix it.

The chimes of Graham Chapel are known for more than timekeeping; a rough week of classes is sometimes rewarded with a song.

“Songs usually [play] on Fridays at five unless there’s an event going on,” said Greenwell-Wright. “That’s a lot of the time, so it hardly ever plays, but we try.”
However, don’t expect to be making requests any time soon. The chimes use proprietary software and Maas-Rowe is calling the shots.

“It has to come from the Maas-Rowe company that does the chimes, and it’s a CD of hymns you load it into the chimes player. It can’t be just a regular CD,” said Greenwell-Wright. “We have maybe a hundred or so songs, [on] a couple different CDs. I just pick them or random if I don’t feel like looking through them all.”

The songs include classics such as “The Sound of Music,” “Singin’ In The Rain,” “Send In The Clowns,” and “My Way.”

Popularity: 1% [?]

 Print This Post

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:00 pm and is filed under @Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.