Joey Brink, who graduated from the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science in 2011, recently used what he learned in college to make his pursuit of a lifelong hobby a little bit easier. Brink is a carillonneur — that is, one who plays the carillon.
A news story published on the Yale School of Engineering website indicates that Brink “played the Harkness Memorial Carillon throughout his time as an undergraduate.”
The Yale School of Engineering news story explains that “the carillon offers a unique challenge as a musical instrument: each one is different, with a different number of bells, different masses to the bells, and thus a different touch required on the part of a player … Yale’s carillon has 54 bells and weighs 43 tons — not exactly something you can carry with you to practice on in the privacy of your home. … For his senior project, Brink (with Jean Zheng, a graduate student at the Yale School of Engineering) decided to put his engineering experience to work to address the problem, creating a miniature practice carillon that could be adjusted to mimic the feel of a real instrument.”
Learn about the Yale University Guild of Carillonneurs here, and about the carillon here. Read the Yale School of Engineering news story here.