Chamber of Atonal Harmonics

The Chamber of Atonal Harmonics is a curated holding on Floor 316, devoted to the acquisition, description, and long-term storage of sounds that fail to resolve. Its stock is small by Tower standards — some four thousand vessels, baffles, and sealed score-fragments at the last count — but it is the only collection whose contents are catalogued according to how nearly they are music. The Chamber does not perform. Nothing in it has been performed since the recital of 9 Prairial, 604, an event the Chamber's own accession notes describe only as "concluded."

Holdings and arrangement

The Chamber's principal series is the Unresolved Interval Collection, arranged not by composer, date, or key, but by the fraction of a beat by which each item declines to close. Items are therefore shelved in an ascending ladder from the almost-resolving (shelf A, under one-sixteenth) to the stubborn (shelf Delta, above a full beat). Curators may consult shelf Delta only in pairs; the regulation dates from 671 and has never been explained in writing. A secondary series holds what the accession ledger calls "absences with a duration" — rests extracted from nine hundred works and stored separately, each in a stoppered glass tube with a paper label. The tubes are not labelled with the work they came from, on the grounds that a rest attributed to a work is no longer a rest.

The Chamber's reading room is fitted with a single Resonator Bell of the older pattern, rung to signal the end of consultation. It has not been rung since 604, and the reason for that is a matter of some embarrassment to the present staff.

Incidents of record

The Chamber is best known outside Floor 316 for the events of 3 and 4 Ventose, 712. On those two days the entire stock of the Chamber was loaded onto carts for a routine fumigation and delivered instead, by a carrier working from a mis-copied docket, to the Sequential Interpretation stacks. The matter is recorded as the Great Mis-Shelving Incident of 712, and it is frequently mis-stated: the Chamber did not receive the Sequential Interpretation supplements, nor did the supplements receive the Chamber. Both parties lost their holdings to the same corridor, and neither has ever publicly conceded the direction of the error. The Chamber's own account, filed under seal, states that its materials were "taken up" rather than sent, a phrasing the Guild of Structural Resonators has twice declined to arbitrate.

The recital of 604 is the other episode one cannot avoid. A visiting ensemble essayed the Chamber's shelf Delta repertoire before an audience of eleven, of whom nine were curators. The performance ended at the first interval, which resolved. The Chamber's response was to acquire the interval, catalogue it as an accidental resolution, and seal the recital hall — a procedure since cited as precedent in the Dispute over the Silent Bell Harmonics by the Department of Temporal Harmonics, which argued that a sound may be neutralised by the mere fact of having been heard. The Chamber was not a party to that dispute and has asked not to be described as one.

Governance and classification

Whether the Chamber's holdings fall under the Determination of Unsupervised Harmonics has been disputed for sixty years. That Determination requires any item with a Resonance Coefficient above 0.85 to be entered in the Register of Resolved Harmonics, a parchment registry maintained on Floor 707 and administered with the aid of the Axis of Attenuation. The Chamber contends that its materials are not harmonics but atonals, and that the Coefficient is undefined for sounds that refuse the octave. The Librarians have neither accepted nor rejected this reading. They have, however, required the Chamber to log every use of a Threnodic Caliper in the Register, along with the coefficient it declines to measure — an instruction the Chamber's then-keeper, Ovin Sarrow, described in a minute of 19 Frimaire, 728, as "arithmetic performed upon an argument." Sarrow's minute is preserved in the Chamber's annex and is not widely cited.

A further conflict concerns Clause 303 of the Twenty-Second Concordance, which governs the storage of objects that alter the manner of their own storage. The Chamber reads the Clause as inapplicable, since an unresolved interval alters nothing but itself; the Chamber of Provisional Contradiction reads it as squarely applicable, and has filed an opinion to that effect. The question was referred to the Chamber Assembly in 741 and remains before it.

Scholarly disagreement

The standard Handbook of Shelved Harmonics (14th recension) states that the Chamber was established in 559 by the Guild of Structural Resonators and transferred to Librarian control in 590. The Chamber's own foundation docket gives 561 and makes no mention of the Guild. A minority view, advanced by the cataloguer Enne Vath in her 733 survey of the middle floors, holds that the Chamber predates both dates and was originally a stairwell, and that its first curator was appointed to catalogue the stairwell's echoes and never dismissed. Vath's evidence is largely circumstantial and entirely persuasive to about a third of the field.

The Chamber has declined to alter its entry in Determination 44 or to seek review under Stride Permits, on the stated ground that its premises are not, in the relevant sense, walked through.

Access

Consultation is granted by written application to the keeper, on Floor 316, between the second and fifth hour. Visitors are asked to leave their own hearing at the door and collect it on departure. The Chamber regrets that it cannot accept responsibility for intervals brought in from other floors.