Online Glockenspiel

Glockenspiel sound board

Tap a button to hear it. Each one is a short glockenspiel sound built from the instrument above — the magic sparkle of a glissando, a single ding, a success jingle, a doorbell — and each one downloads as a WAV file you can drop into a video, a game, a slideshow or a lesson.

The sounds are made on this page, not recorded, so there is nobody else’s copyright in them: use them for anything, including commercial work, with no credit needed. They are the orchestral glockenspiel at concert pitch, with a little room around them. The Westminster chime is the clock-tower tune from 1793, which is in the public domain like every song here.

Two glockenspiels

The chips above the bars switch between the two glockenspiels most people will ever meet. The orchestral glockenspiel is 2½ octaves, written G3 to C6: thirty thick steel bars in a case, struck with hard brass or plastic mallets. The bell kit is 32 bars, written F3 to C6 — two more at the bottom — and it is the one in the carry case from school band, with bars that are usually aluminium rather than steel.

Aluminium and steel are, oddly, almost the same for this purpose: the ratio of stiffness to density that sets a bar’s pitch is nearly identical in the two metals, so a bell-kit bar is about as long as a glockenspiel bar for the same note. What differs is how heavy the bar is. An aluminium bar weighs about a third of a steel one, and a kit’s bars are thinner too, so each tap puts less energy in and more of it leaks into the felt the bar rests on. Play the same note on both: the kit is lighter and, in this model, quiet again in about half the time.

Why it sounds like a bell

A glockenspiel is a xylophone’s layout in steel, and the metal is only half of why it sounds so different. The other half is that nobody carves the bars. A xylophone or a marimba bar has an arch cut into its underside, and the arch is tuning: it pulls the first overtone to exactly three or four times the note. A glockenspiel bar is left plain, so its overtones fall where physics puts them for a plain bar — at 2.76 and 5.40 times the note, which are not musical intervals at all.

On a wooden toy those same overtones are a dull knock, because wood kills them in a few milliseconds. In steel they ring, and that bright, slightly clangy shimmer at the start of every note is what the word glockenspiel — “bell play” — is describing. It still reads as a clear note because the shimmer dies long before the note itself does, so the ear hears a bell-like strike settle into a pure tone. And with no tube under the bars there is nothing to shorten them: a steel bar rings for seconds, which is why glockenspiel parts are so sparse, and why one tap is heard over a whole orchestra.

It sounds two octaves above what it shows

A glockenspiel is a transposing instrument, two octaves’ worth. The bars here are labelled with the written notes, G3 to C6 on the orchestral instrument, and they sound two octaves higher, G5 to C8 — the top bar is the top note of a piano. A melody written around middle C comes out where a music box plays, which is the glockenspiel’s home.

That is also the first thing to know if you point a tuner at a real one: the dial will read two octaves above your part, and both are right. The marimba tuner checks glockenspiels bar by bar, alongside the xylophone, the vibraphone and the marimba.

Songs to play

Press Play a song under the instrument and pick one. The orchestral glockenspiel plays 22 of the 22 public-domain songs here and the bell kit 22, because every song sits inside the 2½ octaves both share. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Silent Night, Jingle Bells and Brahms’ Lullaby are the ones that sound most like a glockenspiel should — slow, high and ringing.

Play plays it for you and lights each bar as it sounds. Practice lights the next bar and waits for you. Play along drops a ring onto each bar in time with the music and tells you at the end how close you were; switch on wait for me and it pauses at every note until you find it. Because the bars ring on, leave a little space between notes — a fast run blurs into one shimmer, exactly as it does on the real thing.

A piano keyboard made of steel

The bars are laid out like a piano: the naturals in the front row, the sharps raised in a back row, each over the gap between the two naturals it sits between. Drag along the front row for a glissando — the sweep that the sound board’s Magic sparkle is made of.

On a computer keyboard Q is G3 on both sizes, and the twenty-six letters run up the bars chromatically, sharps included, from G3 to G♯5 — every note any song here uses. The bell kit’s two extra bars at the bottom, F3 and F♯3, are there to tap. Turn the letters off in the controls under the instrument once you no longer need them.

What the sound is made of

Nothing here is a recording. Each note is built as it is struck: the note, the plain bar’s overtones at 2.76 and 5.40 times its frequency, and a short bright click from a hard mallet. The overtones are not tuned by ear; they are the solutions of the equation for a bar free at both ends, the same numbers the toy xylophone rings at. What is not measured is the balance between them, because there is no single correct glockenspiel to measure. Every bar is at exactly its pitch every time, and the first tap sounds instantly because there is nothing to download.

More instruments you can play here

The online xylophone and the online marimba are the same layout in wood — play one tune on all three and the difference is the carving and the metal. The online kalimba is the other steel instrument you strike, with its own songbook of tabs.

Frequently asked questions