The chime unit of pre-programmed melody type and that of programmable melody type for the electric clock and the mechanical clock. The chime units consist of the hour and the minute hands position sensing means using magnetic Reed switches or photo-transistors, melody decoding circuits using D-type Flip Flop to trigger counters to provide proper addressing signals to ROMs or RAMs, ROMs or RAMs which contain pre-programmed control signals of multiplexers, notes synthesizer generating all tones needed as input to multiplexers, multiplexers for selecting and mixing the tones from notes synthesizer to form the chime notes, decay generator and voltage controlled amplifier to provide decaying characteristics of chime notes, and speaker to convert electrical signal to mechanical sound. For the programmable melody type, there is an additional notes decoder to convert the notes to the control signals of the multiplexers and store in RAMs.