The Baird Carillon in Burton Tower is a musical instrument that doubles as a time-telling device. Every fifteen minutes from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. it plays portions of the “Westminster Quarters,” adding one bar at a time until the full sixteen-note tune plays on the hour—followed by the carillon’s biggest bell, “Big Baird,” counting off the time.

At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Carillonist and U-M music prof Tiffany Ng learned otherwise when she returned from a sabbatical in 2020. “People in the Old Fourth Ward community reached out to me [saying] ‘We want to … support our health workers’” by ringing the bells each evening at 7 p.m.

With fifty-three bells spanning 4.5 octaves, the Baird carillon weighs more than forty-three tons, making it the third-largest in the world. But since a new control system was installed, “Big Baird” (foreground) only booms one o’clock. | Photo: Reian Zhang

But while she was on an international concert tour, Indiana-based Smith’s Bell and Clock Service had sold the university a new, computerized control system for the carillon. “They scheduled the meeting without me,” Ng recalls. “I tried to make the meeting, but they were already gone.

“I thought they would let me in on further email correspondence, but they already installed the system.” And as a result, Big Baird lost track of the time.

According to one of her former students who was in town, Ng emails, after the installation it “was actually striking 2 times more than the hour (4 strikes at 2 pm, 8 strikes at 6 pm). After some time doing this, it eventually went down to chiming 1 o’clock every hour.”

That’s what it’s been doing ever since. When she tried to program the 7 p.m. front-line ring into the system, Ng says, “I found out that it was never hooked up to the internet.”

That wasn’t a concern when Burton Tower was built in 1936. The tower is a memorial to Marion LeRoy Burton, a U-M president in the 1920s, while the carillon is named for Charles Baird, the U-M’s first athletic director and the project’s biggest advocate and donor. With fifty-three bells spanning 4.5 octaves, the instrument weighs more than forty-three tons, making it the third-largest carillon in the world.

The Baird Carillon already had an automated system that Ng, who joined the university in 2015, estimates dates to the 1990s. When she left, she says, that system “was very finicky but still working.” She thinks Smith’s Bell and Clock went wrong “attempting to connect a 21st-century system to a 1936 system.”

She says she “found out afterward through private communications from colleagues that in different parts of the country, this is something they have done at other towers. Essentially gone around the country to sell their system directly to the city or whoever controls the carillon.” But as far as she knows, the Baird was the only one that lost track of the time, apparently because of a software problem.

“I don’t blame anyone within the university for this issue.” Ng says. “Nobody in the facilities [department] has been eager to fix this problem because nobody signed up for this problem.”

Ng also plays the sixty-bell Ann & Robert H. Lurie Carillon, housed in the tower of the same name on North Campus. (Bob Lurie was a U-M engineering grad who made a fortune in real estate with frat brother and law alum Sam Zell.) Younger and smaller than the Baird, the Lurie bells were installed in 1996. Ng says they produce a softer sound and brighter tone and have an automated control system that works fine. (Lurie Tower also serves as a chamber for time capsules, with graduating engineering classes adding to the capsule each year.)

There’s no problem with the Baird’s manual controls, as Ng demonstrated during her annual concert series on July 10. But she wants the automated system repaired, and not just to tell the time.

“The bell tower is one of the main visual symbols of the university,” she says. “It appears in so much of our photography and our logos. It’s really iconic … The visual and the sonic work together to provide that symbolism we can all share. The bell tower is present with us all day and marks all the wonderful things we do on campus, marking our memories with the sound of bells.”

In May, “I wrote to facilities wondering if they had an update on this work after a few years,” Ng says. And “I’ve gotten back in touch with the company that installed this to ask them if it is a software problem that they can finally fix.

“If they can do that, we will finally be back in business.”