Change Ringing: The ringing of a set of chimes or bells, especially in a belltower, with every possible unrepeated variation.
This is really interesting. Or at least I think so; I've been doing some reading on this stuff.
This is done with bells in church towers for the most part. Change-ringers try to ring bells in different orders, with no bell moving more than one place in succesive rows. And they try to ring all possible orders following that rule. It's hard - with 7 seven bells, there are 5040 permutations and to play them all takes 3 hours or so.
People try to compose out peals that solve the problem and some sound really neat when performed. They also exhibit cool mathematical properties.
Plain Bob Minimus is a way of ringing 4 bells and you can graph out the placement of one of the bells, here is bell 2 graphed out in Plain Bob Minimus:
Here is Plain Bob Doubles (6 bells) graphed out (the last bell doesn't move):
Pretty cool. You can also graph out where each sequence can go within a certain peal and get these 3 dimensional graphs where each point is a sequence. Here is part of Bob Doubles shown in two dimensions:
But that's only a part, the entire thing makes a Truncated Octahedron like this:
I have a book with an essay about these in it and some of the 2D graphs of compositions using lots of bells look like these snowflake things.
People compose new peals and there are societies of people who get together and ring bells. Here is a collection of peal compositions:
http://www.ringing.org/main/pages/peals
I found that on a site in the UK, where most of this stuff is done. But here is the
North American Guild of Change Ringers:
http://www.nagcr.org/
Is this not really intersting? I dare you to say it isn't.