Why We Built Love Chimes

We were fourteen when we lost Angela.

She was buried beneath a live oak, and every time we visited, we brought wind chimes. Not because anyone planned it. It just became the thing you did — you drove out there, and you brought one, and you hung it in the branches. Eventually there were twenty of them up in that tree, each one chosen by somebody who missed her.

When the wind blew, they all sang at once.

It didn't sound like noise. It sounded like a hug.

And standing under that tree, I felt something I have never been able to explain properly to anyone. I felt her. Every time those chimes rang, I felt Angela and I felt her love, and it made me feel like her spirit was still out there in the world somewhere. Not sealed in the ground. Not finished.

Free.

That feeling is the entire reason Love Chimes exists. Everything else — the engineering, the frequencies, the business, the learning to make it properly — all of it came after. The idea arrived at a graveside when I was a kid, and it sat with me for decades before I understood what it was asking me to build. We opened Love Chimes in June of 2025.

The thing I couldn't stop thinking about

Here's the thought that wouldn't leave me alone.

A person spends their whole life loving people. They give it away constantly — to their kids, their neighbors, the person behind them in line, the dog who followed them around the kitchen. That's who they were. That's what they did with their time on earth.

And then they die, and everyone acts like the love is over.

It isn't. You can feel that it isn't. Anyone who has lost someone knows the specific ache of being surrounded by proof that a person's love is still moving through the world — in the way you cook, in something your daughter says, in a habit you picked up from them and never gave back.

So what if you could hear it?

Not a reminder of them. Not a sad object on a shelf that makes your chest hurt when you walk past it. Something that takes a small part of the person themselves and puts them back to work doing the one thing they were always best at.

Sending love out. Whether anyone's watching or not.

That's what a memorial Love Chime is. It isn't a keepsake. It's a continuation.

I named it before I knew if it was possible

This is the part where I should tell you I did my research, consulted the experts, and then carefully built a brand around what was achievable.

That is not what happened.

I named it Love Chimes. I made the logo. I wrote the tagline — Whispers of Love in Every Breeze — and I decided we were going to build a wind chime that sang at 528 Hz, the frequency associated with love.

I had no idea whether any of that was possible. I had never cut a tube of aluminum in my life.

It was just a trust in my heart. I knew what it was supposed to feel like, because I had already felt it under that live oak, and I figured the rest was details.

The rest, it turns out, is quite a lot of details.

The email I almost didn't send

I started reading everything I could find about how wind chimes actually work, which is how I ended up on the website of a man named Lee Hite.

Lee has spent years documenting wind chime design — tube lengths, wall thickness, where a chime has to be suspended to ring properly, how metal density and elasticity change a tone, why most commercially made chimes are built wrong. It is generous, careful, deeply technical work, and he gives it away for free.

I read his pages over and over, trying to understand how to get 528 Hz into a wind chime.

And then I wrote him an email. One short paragraph. I introduced myself, said my sister and I wanted to build a business making custom wind chimes, and asked if he'd have a few minutes to answer some questions about the engineering.

I remember exactly what I told myself when I hit send: if this gentleman gets on the phone with me, I'll know this is something I need to pursue in my life.

He didn't know me from anybody.

He got on a Zoom call.

He didn't think it would work

Here's the part of the story I love the most, and it's the part I'd have been tempted to leave out if I were trying to make us look good.

Lee was not convinced.

I told him what I wanted — five tubes, healing frequencies, 528 Hz at the heart of it — and his honest engineering assessment was that the frequencies I'd chosen were too close together. He didn't think they'd be far enough apart on the scale to sound pleasing as a chime.

He didn't tell me I was wrong, exactly. He told me something better.

He said it's all just ideas until you build it and sound test it. Nobody can tell you whether it works — not him, not me — until there's an actual chime hanging in actual wind. So go build it. Then listen.

We got off that call not knowing if our entire idea had legs. There was no business yet, no product, no proof. Just a name, a logo, a tagline, and a stranger's advice to stop theorizing and go make something.

What stayed with me wasn't the engineering. It was that a man who owed me absolutely nothing spent his afternoon on somebody else's dream. His encouragement, his passion, the sheer fresh air of being taken seriously by someone with no reason to take me seriously at all.

That call was the spark to the fire. I still get emotional talking about it.

The first time it sang

Our first prototype was, to put it kindly, janky.

Hand-cut wood. Rigid where it should have moved. We didn't have the pattern down for how the chimes needed to hang, or the dimensions, or honestly much of anything. It looked like exactly what it was — two sisters figuring it out.

And then the wind moved it.

It brought tears to my eyes. I have never forgotten it and I don't expect to. Chills came over my whole body and I stood there with the biggest smile on my face, because it sounded like pure love singing in the wind.

That crooked, homemade, wrong-in-every-measurable-way thing sang. And in that second I knew — following my heart hadn't been naive. It had been the assignment.

Why there are five

Now here's where Lee turns out to have been completely right, in the most beautiful possible way.

You cannot build a wind chime with five tubes all cut to 528 Hz. We learned that by building it. The tubes have to sit far enough apart on the scale for the ear to hear them as separate voices — otherwise you don't get a chord, you get mud. Love, five times over at the same pitch, doesn't sing.

So the physics asked me a question: what goes in the gaps?

I went back to the research. I read everything I could about what each Solfeggio frequency has traditionally been associated with, looking for the ones people would genuinely resonate with, and looking for meanings that belonged in a memorial. And what filled the space around 528 Hz turned out to be exactly what grief actually needs:

528 Hz — Love That Stays The love that didn't leave when they did.

639 Hz — The Bond Between Hearts What you built together. Still built.

741 Hz — Making Room For Light For the days grief loosens its grip enough to let peace in.

852 Hz — Trusting What You Still Feel The sense that they're near. Trust it.

963 Hz — A Love Larger Than Distance Love that was never bound by being in the same room.

528 Hz is the heart of a Love Chime. But it's only one of five, and that's the point. No one is only one thing.

The engineering didn't compromise the meaning. The engineering found the meaning. We went looking for a way to make love audible, and the physics told us love on its own wasn't enough to fill a chime — it needed connection, and release, and intuition, and the thing that stretches past distance.

Which is, if you've ever lost somebody, a fairly accurate description of what you're carrying.

What actually makes the sound

This is the part people don't expect, and it's the part that matters most.

The wind catches the sail — the piece at the very bottom, black anodized aluminum. The sail moves the striker at the center. The striker swings into the five chimes.

And when a small portion of their ashes is set inside that striker, sealed permanently in epoxy, something quietly extraordinary is true:

Their essence isn't decoration. It isn't hidden away inside something. It is the part that strikes the chime.

Every note you hear is made by them.

Not a symbol of them. Not in memory of them. The physical piece that holds what remains of a person is the same piece that creates every sound that chime will ever make, for as long as it hangs there.

That's why how we build them matters so much — the precision cut, the wall thickness, the aluminum, the sanding and polishing and sealing of every tube by hand, the striker set to an exact point at the middle of the chimes so the whole thing sings with nothing more than a breeze.

Because if their love is going to keep going out into the world, the least we can do is make sure it carries.

What I picture

I'll tell you the image I've had in my head since the beginning.

Wind chimes hanging in yards all over. Thousands of them. Every one of them built around a real person — somebody's mother, somebody's dad, somebody's soul animal, somebody's wife who died too young.

And every time the wind moves, love leaves that yard. Over the fence. Down the street. Past a stranger walking their dog who has no idea whose love just touched them.

Nobody forgotten. Everybody still loving people.

We keep hearing them. We keep feeling them.

That's the whole thing. That's the entire heart behind Love Chimes, and it hasn't changed since I was standing under a live oak at fourteen, wondering why a tree full of cheap wind chimes felt more like Angela than anything else on earth did.

Grief tells you their story is finished.

This is our answer to that.

An email I owe someone

I never went back and told Lee what happened.

He got on a call with a stranger who had a name, a logo, and a feeling. He told her the truth — that he doubted it — and then he told her to go build it and find out. We did. It worked. It's a business now. There are Love Chimes hanging in yards in several states, each one built around somebody who is still loving people.

He has no idea.

Writing this is what made me realize I need to fix that. So Lee, if you ever read this: you spent an afternoon on two sisters with an idea, and it became the thing we've built our lives around. Thank you for the encouragement and the faith. I have never forgotten it.

That's the other thing I've learned from all of this. You never really know which of your small kindnesses turns into somebody's whole life.

That's true of an afternoon on a Zoom call.

And it's true of a life spent loving people, which keeps going out into the world long after you'd think it would stop.

Whispers of love in every breeze.

Our frequency language is symbolic and Solfeggio-inspired. We precision cut our aluminum tubes using frequency calculations and measure them to come as close as possible to the intended tones. We do not tune the tubes after cutting, and we do not claim that each finished Love Chime produces exact frequencies. The 528 Hz-inspired Love Frequency is part of the meaning, intention and emotional story behind each piece.

Ready to Create a Love Chime?

Every Love Chime is a one-of-a-kind commissioned heirloom, handcrafted in DFW, Texas, and designed around your story — custom colors, meaningful symbols, hand-painted artwork, and the option to include a small part of a loved one's remains.

Commissioned pieces begin at $444.44. Most are finished within 3 to 4 weeks after design approval.

Explore: Memorial · Pet Memorial · Wedding · Anniversary · Sacred Milestones

See our work: Browse the Love Chimes gallery

Start a conversation — nothing is due today: Text Us: 817-318-8988 · Call Us: 817-318-8988 · Email Us: hello@love-chimes.com

Or tell us who you're honoring — six questions, thirty seconds. Breck or Crystal will reply personally, usually the same day.