Blancpain Built a Watch That Treats Time Like Music

We went back to Switzerland to hear a watch.

Not see it. Hear it, because Blancpain spent eight years proving that in the right hands, time isn’t just visual. It’s musical.

Le Brassus is quieter than we remembered. Snow piled against old stone buildings, heat fogging the factory windows. 

Blancpain could have shown us its archives or walked us through the usual movement-making choreography. Instead, they sat us down, closed the door, and revealed one object. One idea. One obsession carried for almost a decade: the Grande Double Sonnerie.

It is the most complex watch Blancpain has ever built. More than one thousand components and a movement that exists nowhere else. A fully integrated grand sonnerie that strikes time in passing, a minute repeater on demand, a retrograde perpetual calendar, a flying tourbillon, and something completely unprecedented in a wristwatch: two selectable melodies, each one rendered on four distinct notes. 

One melody is the classic Westminster chime. The other was composed with Eric Singer from KISS, a longtime friend of the brand and a real collector who understands how deeply sound and watchmaking rhyme.

Sound is where this project becomes human. Blancpain’s watchmakers do not tune the notes by ear. They measure them with lasers, adjusting rose gold gongs at the microscopic level until each note vibrates at its exact frequency. Nothing about the process is rushed. If the tone is wrong, the watch simply will not sing.

They tell you this calmly, almost casually. Then they give you silence. Phones rise. The Westminster chime strikes at noon. Four notes, each delivered by its own hammer, ring crisp and warm through a red gold acoustic membrane hidden under the bezel. At 12:59, with the longest possible sequence, you understand the real point. 

The harmony is not there to impress you but to show the emotional side of engineering. Music and watchmaking have always shared a language. Timing, resonance, rhythm, the discipline of mastering something that most people will never see.

Marc Hayek, Blancpain’s CEO, describes the grand sonnerie as a lifelong goal. The idea only became real when advances like magnetic regulation and silicon springs made silence between strikes possible. When the complication could be controlled, modernized, and made truly wearable. His insistence on that word matters. 

Wearable. A chiming watch this complicated usually lives in a vault. This one was designed to be passed around a dinner table. You feel the size, but you also feel intention. Short lugs, slim height, and safety systems that prevent accidents. The engineering exists to enable joy, not restrict it.

Some people will see the price and stop there. Others will see a statement. Not a trophy piece but proof that Blancpain still builds at the frontier of fine watchmaking, still believes complexity should serve beauty. Inside that quiet valley, surrounded by wood shavings and gentian-stem polishing tools, the watch is almost poetic. 

A reminder that our relationship to time isn’t only measured by hands and indexes. It can ring. It can resonate. It can move.

In a world obsessed with what’s loud or quiet, Blancpain’s Grande Double Sonnerie lands somewhere else entirely. Not loud. Not shy. Just deeply made. And when the melody hits, it feels like the most human thing in the room.