STOCKTON, Calif. — For the past eight months, some midtown Stockton neighborhoods have been unusually silent. The sound of soft music floating down twice daily from the 12-story stained-glass-adorned Burns Tower has been mute since August when renovation work began on the tower, a landmark in the Stockton skyline.
"When it's working, you can almost ignore it, because it's so regular," said Daniel Walker, a University of the Pacific engineer who oversees the tower, housed on the east side of the university's campus. "But when it's not playing, people recognize."
In addition to audibly telling the time, the Burns Tower is typically programmed to play one of four songs at 12:30 p.m. and 11 p.m. each day with 122 miniature bells set to familiar tunes, including the University's own "Pacific Hail".
Walker says that during construction the bell tower still chimed at the start of each hour, but nearby residents called on multiple occasions, asking where their free daily performances went. The bells began ringing again for the twice-daily shows on April 1.
"A lot of my friends live in the neighborhood and they'll send me the Nextdoor posts or Facebook posts and say, 'Look, they're talking about the tower. They're wondering when the music is coming back,'" Walker said. "It all funnels up until it gets to someone that knows that they should tell me about it and then I get basically a stack of (complaints)."
Renovations made to the 59-year-old tower now allow the daily performances to include a new group of four songs. Walker says he hopes to gradually program the tower to play more songs over time.
"We changed to a computer program because it was more versatile. But when we did that, we weren't able to pull any of the old songs off the old box, because the technology was so much older," Walker said. "The goal right now is to, as time goes on, slowly add to the list so that it has more songs to play."
While the Burns Tower is no longer the tallest structure in the city of Stockton, as it was for the three decades following its construction, its visibility and voice make it an iconic part of the midtown and central Stockton communities.
Walker hopes the sounds of a functioning bell tower will once again be music to the ears of hundreds of Stockton residents and commuters, taking a moment to enjoy art in the middle of a busy city.
"I know there's a lot of strong feelings about the chimes," Walker said. "It's very well-liked."
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