 Michael Harrington, SRN News. The sound of church bells is a quaint bit of an automated background noise for most people, but before modern communications, it was bell ringing that transmitted important information and knit together communities across Europe. Now a small school of bell ringers in northeastern Spain is working to recover an entire language of tolling. Automation has largely replaced bell ringers in churches in Western Europe. UNESCO recently added manual bell ringing to its cultural heritage. This is SRN News.