Echo Collection

Echo Collection is the collective term for the procedures, instruments, and archival obligations by which sound, once spoken in the Tower, is taken up, fixed to a medium, and made to answer again. It is not a single department. The Collection is administered under Third Concordance and its many recensions, and its practice is divided among the Office of Experimental Resonance, the Echo Archive at Floor 4044, and a body of licensed collectors whose commissions are recorded but whose number is kept by the Holdback Collection and never published.

In ordinary usage the phrase denotes the result rather than the work — the accumulated store of a given floor or province — and this ambiguity has occasioned more disputes than any technical question in the field.

Governance and instruments

The Collection is governed by Third Concordance, Article 9, which establishes that no sound may be collected where it was not first heard, and by the Sixth Concordance, Annex 2, which establishes that no sound may be heard where it was not first collected. Both clauses remain in force. The Concordance of Precedence has ruled twice that they are not in conflict, on the reasoning that the two clauses describe different directions of travel, and once that they are, but the ruling was withdrawn before circulation.

Medium classes approved for use are entered in the registry of the Office of Experimental Resonance, which maintains the list of approved media in continuous revision and a separate, shorter list of media approved in principle and not yet approved in fact. When a medium is struck from the first list it is not removed from the second; the discrepancy is not an error, and collectors are asked not to tidy it.

Collection apparatus is certified under the provisions of Volume II: Materials and Mediums, in the manner also applied by the Stacks Annex. Certification of a single collection bell may take eleven weeks. A bell may be used before certification; it may not be rung.

Mediums and practice

Three mediums account for the great majority of holdings. Echo-Glass is the oldest and remains the standard for liturgical and adjudicative sound, on the ground that it fails visibly. Echo Crystal holds a denser impression but has been restricted since the Verrin Revision to material under sixty seconds, after a collector at Provincial Collection Gamma-7 attempted to fix a three-hour boundary recitation and produced what the incident report calls "a surface of great conviction and no content." Echo Sound is now the preferred term for the audible residue itself, distinguishing it from Echo-lines, which are the traces left upon a medium and which are read rather than heard.

The collection of sound is termed Echo Sourcing where it is done by licence, and unlicensed sourcing is not distinguished from licensed sourcing in the records, because the record of a sound does not carry the manner of its taking. This has been defended by the Office of Experimental Resonance as "a neutrality proper to the material" (Registry Memorandum 44-C) and attacked by the same office eleven years later as "a neutralities proper to nothing" (Registry Memorandum 51-A).

Disputes over which medium has primacy are treated under the Echo Primacy Debate, which is not a disagreement about mediums at all and is best left to its own entry.

The Echo Archive and its offices

Completed collections are deposited with the Echo Archive at Floor 4044, which is at once a repository, an administrative body overseeing the use of Echo-Glass, and a register of concluded petitionary conflicts — three entities under one name, and one of them under two. Deposits are entered by floor, by donor, and by the hour of collection, but not by medium, since medium is recoverable from the object and the Archive prefers not to duplicate what the object already says.

The Archive is distinct from the Hollow Echo Archive at Sub-level Θ, which collects silences, absences, and auditory voids. The two archives exchange material twice yearly. The exchanges are conducted in a room with two doors, and the couriers are chosen for their indifference to the contents of the crates.

The Sanctioned Echo and the limits of standing

Not every sound collected is admitted to standing. A Sanctioned Echo is one whose collection has been confirmed by the Archive as a true impression, and unsanctioned holdings are stored but not cited. The difference matters chiefly in adjudication: a Certified Echo can be entered in evidence, while an uncertified echo is entered in the margin.

The Echo Containment provisions of the Ninth Concordance set the limits within which a collection may be held without decay. A collection held beyond these limits is not destroyed; it is said to have "gone quiet," and a quiet holding may be re-sanctioned only by a proctor's dual authorization, as with the Holdback Collection. Deliberate exploration of decayed material is the subject of Echo-Dreaming and is not a collecting activity, though collectors do it.

The aggregate of all sanctioned holdings — mapped, stratified, and cross-indexed by floor and by hour — is maintained as the Aggregate Echo Map and is revised at intervals of no less than forty years, a period fixed in the belief that the Tower's sounds settle slowly. The last full revision is disputed; the Echo-Stratifications record a partial revision at the eleventh hour of a winter whose floor number has been mislaid.

Disputed readings

The central scholarly disagreement concerns whether a collection is a copy or an addition. The theory of the Grand Echo holds that every collection draws upon a single continuous resonance and that holdings are therefore portions of one sound, collected twice over. The Systemic Echo Theory holds instead that each act of collection creates a new and separable resonance, so that the Tower grows louder with every honest deposit.

The difference is not academic. Under the first reading, a collector who gathers the same sound on two floors has gathered it once, and one deposit must be surrendered. Under the second, both are real and both are owed their due. The Project Sympathetic Echo was commissioned to settle the question and returned a report of 1,400 pages, of which 1,396 concern the difficulties of the commission. Its conclusion occupies a single sentence, and that sentence is sealed.

"A collection is not complete until it has been asked for twice by two different offices, and it is never complete."

— Office of Experimental Resonance, Registry Memorandum 51-A, closing clause

Recent dispute

Between the ninth and fourteenth revisions of the registry, the Office of Experimental Resonance and the Stacks Annex disagreed over whether the certification of a collection bell also certified the air the bell moved through. The Annex held that air is a material, and materials fall under Volume II. The Office held that air is a medium, and mediums fall under its registry. The matter was referred to Provincial Collection Gamma-7, which administers the Collection of Unallocated Doors and had no view on air whatever, and whose reply — one word, "Neither" — was entered into the record and is regarded as settled.

Collectors are reminded that bells are rung at the depositor's expense and that the sound of a bell is not itself collectible. The prohibition is old, it is written plainly on the door of the Floor 4044 receiving room, and it is tested roughly once a decade.