A purely mechanical bell in a clock tower that automatically rings gradually faster on a specific night of the year

This question pertains to the videogame The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. In this game, the bell from the Clock Town clock tower can be heard from pretty much anywhere in the world at certain times, when it rings at regular intervals to announce the fall of night or the break of dawn. However, each 'time cycle' in the game ends with the dawning of the Carnival of Time, a festival of cultural and religious significance in-universe, wherein the bell rings much more frequently. On this day, from the hours between midnight and 5 AM, the bell rings once every 10 in-game minutes (10 IRL seconds). From 5:00 to 5:30, it starts ringing more frequently, at intervals of once every 5 in-game minutes/5 IRL seconds. Once 5:30 hits, it starts ringing at intervals of once every 3 in-game minutes/IRL seconds.

This is obviously done mostly for atmospheric reasons as if you allow the game clock to reach 6:00 AM on this day it'll mark a game over from an apocalyptic scenario, but my question is: how viable would it be to automate a bell in a clock tower system with purely mechanical (i.e. non-electronic) components to do this on a specific night?

Cursory research has taught me that fully mechanical clocks have been a thing since at least the 14th Century and chiming clocks date back to the 1600s, but so far nothing that has left me satisfied with trying to figure out if a mechanism such as I've described here could be viable assuming it was fully automated and mechanical for one specific night (as opposed to being forced to assume a human bell ringer). This assumes being limited to real-world physics, as this is a universe where magic exists.

posted almost 6 years ago

Ricardi‭

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