It was during the fourteenth century that the church bell was wedded to a technical invention of great significance for European civilization: the mechanical clock. Together they became the most inescapable signals of the soundscape, for like the church bell, and with even more merciless punctuality, the clock measures the passing of time audibly. In this way it differs from all previous means of telling time—water clocks, sand clocks and sundials—which were silent.

Schafer, Murray R, The Soundscape- Our Sonic E…, loc. 195