Proclamation of Acoustic Quieture

Proclamation of Acoustic Quieture is a foundational acoustic instrument of the Tower, distinguished from the considerably better-known Proclamation of Acoustic Quietude by a single terminal letter and by almost nothing else that any two offices can agree upon. It is the document from which the Acoustic Dampening Guild derives its jurisdiction, and it is cited in no fewer than nine hundred and forty surviving recensions, of which the Tower's own Registry of Acoustic Properties recognises four as authoritative and the remainder as "circulant."

The Quieture was sealed in the winter of the year recorded as 3117 by the reckoning of the Lower Reading Rooms, though the Office of Acoustic Integrity maintains that the seal was applied in 3119 and that the earlier figure is a transcription error propagated by the Acoustic Registry of the Tower. Both dates are printed on the current official face of the document. Neither has been struck.

Content and scope

The Proclamation is brief. Its operative text runs to eleven lines and establishes, in the main, that sound within the Tower must be accounted for — that is, entered in a register, assigned a permeability class, and permitted to persist only insofar as its class allows. The instrument does not define sound. It defines what may be done with it.

Its most consequential provision is Clause 3, which assigns to the Acoustic Dampening Guild the regulatory counterbalance of the Acoustic Weavers’ Guild. The Quieture thus predates, and is frequently mistaken for, the Proclamation of Acoustic Quietude, which would charter the Weavers under Annex 17.xi of a separate instrument some decades later. The Acoustic Reconciliation Bureau has ruled twice that the two Proclamations are "distinct in origin, adjacent in consequence, and inseparable in practice" (Bureau Minute 44-C, Quietude Ordinances).

"Where a Guild regulates, a countervailing Guild shall be constituted, and where two countervailing Guilds dispute, the Proclamation shall be cited by whichever party has the better copy."

— Proclamation of Acoustic Quieture, Clause 3

The Question of the Missing Annex

The Quieture is universally described as possessing an Annex B. No complete copy of Annex B survives. The four authoritative recensions each preserve a different fragment: a heading, a table of permeability thresholds, a single sentence concerning stairwells, and a marginal note reading, in full, "not to be read aloud." The Department of Acoustic Phenomena has spent eleven years attempting a reconstruction, and its interim report concedes that the fragments cannot be reconciled without positing an Annex B longer than the Proclamation itself.

The practical difficulty is that Clause 3's counterbalance provision is generally held to depend on a schedule contained in the missing annex, which would specify which Guild counterbalances which. On the strength of the surviving fragments, the Dampening Guild counterbalances the Weavers. On the strength of the stairwell sentence, the Dampening Guild counterbalances the Dampening Guild. The Moratorium Notice of the following year suspended all enforcement of Clause 3 pending resolution. It has not been lifted. Enforcement nonetheless continues.

Dispute between the Office and the Registry

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns whether the Quieture is a founding instrument or a correction. The Office of Acoustic Integrity holds that it is foundational, and points to its seal and its eleven-line operative text as evidence of original authority. The Acoustic Registry of the Tower, by contrast, maintains that the Quieture is a recension of an earlier, lost instrument — provisionally designated the Quieture Antecedent — and that its apparent brevity is the result of abbreviation rather than restraint. The Registry's argument rests on the Proclamation's use of the phrase "as heretofore established," which it reads as a backward reference. The Office reads the same phrase as a formality.

The dispute has produced what the Tower's clerks call the Quieture Line: two parallel bodies of commentary, one filed under the Office's seal and one under the Registry's, which cite each other freely and agree on nothing. The Acoustic Remediation Corps has been obliged to maintain duplicate copies of both.

The Clerk's Grievance

In the winter of the year after the Moratorium, a clerk of the Lower Registry named Halven Orr petitioned the Librarians for clarification of the Quieture's spelling. Orr had been assigned to transcribe the instrument into the Acoustic Registry of the Tower and found, on comparison, that the Dampening Guild's sealed copy read Quieture while the Office's copy read Quietude in the title and Quieture in the body. Orr's petition asked which was correct. It was returned, per standing practice, with the single annotation "both," signed by a hand Orr could not identify.

Orr transcribed both spellings in parallel columns and was thereafter transferred to the Acoustic Inversion desk, where he is recorded as having filed no further petitions. His parallel-column transcription remains in use and is the reason the Registry's index lists the Quieture and the Quietude as adjacent entries with the note "consult both; do not reconcile."

Findings and current status

The Quieture is presently in force, as are the Quietude Ordinances derived from its better-known counterpart, and the two bodies of law are applied simultaneously on the same floors by different officers who do not confer. Where they conflict — most often over the permissible persistence of a sound in a stairwell — the officer with the older seal prevails, a rule attributed to the lost Annex B and to no surviving text.

Visitors are reminded that the Proclamation may be consulted in the Reading Rooms of the Lower Registry, that it may not be read aloud, and that the reading room closes at the ninth bell regardless of whether the reader has finished.