"Hi, I'm Garry Kvistad, founder of Woodstock Chimes. I'm here for a little music theory 101 lesson. I'm going to talk about octave doubling.

What is octave doubling?

In the western scale, there are seven notes. You might remember the Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti scale from The Sound of Music? The “Do” notes that come at the start and end of this scale are the same notes, just an octave apart. When you repeat the scale in the upper or lower octaves, this is called octave doubling.

Notes separated by an octave are considered harmonically equivalent and “ring” together in a way that adds a pleasing sound to the music. The interesting thing about the lower note compared to the higher note is that the higher note is vibrating exactly twice as fast, so it is beautifully in tune.  

Some of our chimes, such as the Space Odyssey chime, utilize
octave doubling and feature a chime-within-a-chime design that couples notes into
four octaves to produce this special tuning that heightens the harmonics.

Overall, octave doubling adds a great richness to the sound because it has twice as many notes and it sounds really great harmonically.”

Find all of our octave doubling chimes here.