Bell Tower - overcoming limits on audible sound falloff?

Is there any way to increase the range of script-played audible sounds, so they could be heard throughout most of the sim? I am trying to build a bell tower with clocks on the top, that will chime the hour with the Westminster clock chimes. I managed to make the tower and the clocks easily enough, and the clocks display the SL time on their analog faces. And I came up with the needed sound bytes to do the chimes, (two ten-second clips plus the "bong" for the hour count) and LSL code to play them at the top of the hour...

But...

The tower is close to 30 M tall, and using llPlaySound to cause the .wav files to play, the sound is already so faint by the time you get to the ground that you can barely hear it! Standing in front of the building that is right next to the tower, I can barely hear the chimes if they originate at the clock face on top. The volume setting is at 1.0, which is the max allowed (Any higher is ignored and treated as 1.0). My client settings are turned up high enough that the rest of the ambient sounds in the area are as loud as I would ever want them to be. Any louder would be too much.

Even if I moved the prim the sound actually originates from to ground level, it appears I would only be able to hear it for a radius of 30 M.

Is there a workaround for this? Does llSetSoundRadius allow you to extend the effective range? The LSL WIKI is very vague on that statement. It looks more like llSetSoundRadius only allows you to constrain a sound to a tighter than normal cut-off radius.

Also, I considered playing the sound as an audio stream, script-triggered to play at certain times of day, but most of the campus buildings are on their own parcels and already have their own audio streams, so it would be very strange to have the bells heard clearly on the far side of the sim (anywhere in the 'unincorporated parcel' that isn't otherwise allocated for a multimedia stream), yet not audible at all in any of the building's parcels (most of the campus).

scatter sound slave prims around the sim and just have the tower message those prims via regionsay so that they may play the wanted sound.

The slave prims won't need to have any sounds in them if you reference the sounds via their UUIDs

I considered placing a bunch of 'repeaters' like that, but then the sound would be very uneven as you moved around, and in many cases you'd get strange echoes as you went near the boundary between two repeaters. What I am really seeking is a way to make a single point source loud enough to be heard at a distance, like a real bell tower.

Um, have you ever walked around on a campus with a bell tower?

I remember with fondness walking a block away from Burton Tower in Ann Arbor and hearing multiple loud echoes off nearby buildings.

I think this is not just a tolerable side effect, but a nice one. Also, feel free to have dead zones between the repeaters. It's not necessary to completely cover the area. Find a good balance between overlaps and dead zones.

BTW, where there are overlaps, the sound will come from different directions -- just like real echoes. It could be a very nice effect.

I found what was limiting the sound range so much! I had been testing the script by dropping it into a 0.5 M default cube. At 30 M distance, LOD changes make the prim stop rendering, and ALSO makes the script stop being audible! Increasing the size of the prim the script was in, or making it part of a larger linkset, allowed the sound to still be audible 125 M away.

Ah, interesting! /me makes another entry in the notebook ...

Too bad, though -- those echoes would have been sweet

would you be wlling to share the script to make the bell check the time?

Many thanks

I'll add the updated clock script to the Scripting Library, once I work out the remaining bugs. I posted just the chimes part in the Building Tips forum, in a similar thread to this one.

Thank you all for your help and inspiration. My new clock script should be in the Library shortly, as "Ceera's Westminster Clock". My version makes a three-prim clock that auto-regulates to SL time within less than one minute of being rezzed, and chimes the hour with the Westminster clock chimes. The chimes can be silenced by commenting out two lines of code. It has no open listens at all, and should be very low lag.

An example of the clock itself can be found in the NE corner of the "HHP at UH" sim.

Still working on a JIRA report for the sound falloff issue. The results are VERY inconsistent as far as what distance the sound can be heard at. Definitely a bug in the way SL is handling audible sounds from prim scripts.