made@berkeley | Tsar Bell

Old photo of giant bell with men resting around it

made@berkeley
Tsar Bell

Friday, April 15 through Saturday, April 16, 2016
Sather Tower, UC Berkeley

Does a bell have to ring before it is truly a bell? The Russian Tsar Bell was the largest bell ever cast at over 200 tons. But in 1732, before it was even struck, this Goliath of bells broke. Its parts have been on display in the Kremlin ever since. Now, a team of UC Berkeley and Stanford researchers are making the Tsar Bell ring for the very first time.

With Finite Element Analysis (FEA), they created a computational model of what the bell would have sounded like. The recreated Tsar Bell will be “played” in concert with the UC Berkeley Carillon at Sather Tower on Friday, April 15 and Saturday, April 16, 2016 — just in time for Cal Day. Screen Shot 2016-03-10 at 9.45.47 AMA project by Ed Campion, Chris Chafe, Jeff Davis, Olya Dubatova, John Granzow, Jeff Lubow, Perrin Meyer, Greg Niemeyer, and James O’Brien, featuring carillon compositions by Chris Chafe, Jeff Davis and DJ Spooky, with graphics and vidoes by Olya Dubatova.

Special thanks to Romain Michon, Tiffany Ng, Lara Wolfe, Andrew Lampinen, Thomas Le, Alex Niemeyer, Meyer Sound, Berkeley Arts + Design Initiative, Berkeley Center for New Media, Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, UC Berkeley CNMAT, Stanford CCRMA, and the University of Michigan. This program is presented in partnership with made@berkeley, highlighting UC-Berkeley’s collaborative achievements across all fields of the arts and design, Meyer Sound, and the Berkeley Center for New Media.

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