Wind-chimes are made by selecting cylinders with a given length and allowing the wind to collide the tubes together in order to make sounds. This is different from a whistle, such as an organ pipe, where the pitch is determined primarily by the length of the air column. For a whistle, the material that the pipe is made of gives the "timbre" or the "voice" but the air column gives the pitch. This is different from a wind chime, where the tubes are being struck by a clapper.

For a tube, free at both ends ¹⁾:

where:

• is the frequency in Hz.
• is the length in cm.
• is the velocity of sound in the material of the tube wall (eg: Aluminium ²⁾ is 5.1E5 cm/s).
• and represent the inner, respectively outer radius of the tube.

Any choice of notes is allowed, although, some wind-chime producers tune the wind-chimes to popular melodies. In any case, a chromatic music scale can be used to:

1. pick notes,
2. calculate their corresponding frequencies,
3. use the tube-formula (above) to determine the length of the tube.

An example of note selection could be the following sequence:

where to represent the notes on the chromatic scale and the indices indicate the octave ( the first octave, second, etc…).

Alternatively to a chromatic music scale, a pentatonic scale can be used since no combination of notes on a pentatonic is considered dissonant.

Chimes are hung at where represents the length of the chime and hung at in order to be close to the fundamental frequency ³⁾ (clear, without the ulterior reverberations).

In order to further reduce the reverberations (, , etc…) after the collision, sometimes a dampener is used. Usually, it is cylindrical in shape and groups the tubes in the centre (see the sketch).