[krumbie]

That is fascinating. I thought that bells had one or a couple dominant / loud frequencies that would mostly determine pitch, and the rest would just mix in to change the timbre but not the main percept. I always found the sound of melodies played with bells kind of uncomfortable because there is too much going on, too many different frequencies interfering with each other.

[crustycoder]

For literally centuries European bell tuning was all done by rule of thumb, with results varying from to sublime to abysmal. It was all finally figured out by Canon Simpson in 1895/6 who described the relationship between the 5 main components of a bell's strike note - the hum, prime, tierce, quint and nominal.

https://www.hibberts.co.uk/building-a-bell-sound/