Muting a bell with a resonating object

Question

I recently moved into an apartment next to a church with bells and since then I haven't stopped dreaming of ways to mute them. I've been thinking about a design but I'm a little unsure of the feasibility and physics.

The idea is make a hollow cylinder (puck) with a smaller solid puck attached to a spring inside of the hollow one. It would look something like this rough sketch below and would be attached to the inside of the bell.

The idea is that the puck would resonate at exactly the opposite frequency of the bell causing the noise to null out. So given a bell of mass M and frequency F what would the spring constant K and mass of the puck need to be to effectively mute the bell?

Answer 1

As CuriousOne wrote, the device will lack frequencies ( and power )

The general solution is to evaluate the efficiency of Time reversal signal processing.

If

• the bell ringing is , each time it is processed , identical ( rarely true )
• the aerology between the bell and you is each time identical
• you are able to record all the sound and to reproduce it backwards at the same power. Heavy devices needed ; read the 'Overview' of the linked page about other difficulties
• you are able to anticipate the bell , ie with an optical signal

you have a chance to reach your goal.

But these conditions aren't fulfilled with this bell ; it would be better to try classical soundproofing solutions.