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It turns out when the twelve bells of Birmingham Cathedral are being rung the whole tower sways to the rhythm of the bells themselves. I only noticed as I was wedging myself in a corner to stay out of the way of the ringers. And as the circle of bell ringers reversed their direction so too did the motion of the tower. I dread to think what it was like for my poor cameraman above me filming the bells themselves. I've been told at the top of the tower you can get quite seasick.

We were here to report on "Hawkear" a new technical aid for judges in bell ringing competitions. It's been in development in Birmingham for five years now. Microphones are positioned in the top of the bell tower and they record every time a bell is struck. The data is fed into a computer which can then work out the accuracy achieved by each team of bell ringers.

The end result is a simple number, the error rate for each competing team. I assumed that a perfect result for a team would be to achieve an error rate as close to zero as possible. But in fact as bell captain Richard Grimmett explained to me that would produce a soulless sounding peal of bells that would be pretty unappealing to listen to.

The aim isn't to replace judges but rather to supply extra back-up. On Saturday there will be seven teams playing the same twelve minute peal () in competition and each team will play 3456 notes. It's not surprising that the judges might lose focus during the three and a half hour competition. That's where hawkear comes in.

For the teams the system produces reams of data that the teams can take away with them. But as Richard pointed out you wouldn't want to achieve a perfect hawkear score because bell ringing is not just a science it's also an art.

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