Eli

For a grandfather clock. (From the fact that one of Katy's parents' two clocks had a half-second chime interval, which I found hasty and unsettling, and then I was wondering if I'd like it slower than one second, and...) The hour chimes are timed n : n+1 against the ticking of the seconds, so (if you can hear the ticks) you can tell what the hour is without counting, or even if you missed the beginning, just by hearing the timing of the end. n = 12 has a neatness. Lower n to make the vernier increments more distinguishable? n = 7? The ticks will then fall on familiar eighth-note boundaries. 1:00 and 8:00 are equivalent based on final chime/tick synchrony alone, of course, and so forth, but presumably those can't be confused.

(I also noticed there that in a room with a clock I tended to whistle at 120 bpm.)