Protocol of Resonant Arbitration

The Protocol of Resonant Arbitration is the instrument governing the settlement of disputes by measured acoustic means. Ratified in the eleventh recension of the Office of Concordant Arbitration and administered jointly with the Registry of Resonant Frequencies, it establishes that a disagreement between floors may be resolved by striking an approved resonant surface and recording which of the disputants is moved to speak first. It is not to be confused with the Protocol of Resonant Description, which concerns the composition of Phenomenological Descriptions and the induction of cavities into resonance, nor with the Protocol for Interstitial Grievance Arbitration (7th Revision), which addresses objections arising between floors rather than the tone by which they are settled.

Origin and ratification

The Protocol was ratified on the forty-first day of the Concordance 212 session, following a dispute between the Guild of Resonant Masons and the Lampwrights' Guild over who held the right to sound the great tuning-plate on Floor 8,844. The Board of Concordant Arbitration had heard the matter twice and deadlocked on both occasions, a condition the Board's own standing orders describe as "a finding of equal weight, to be recorded as such and not revisited" (Board of Concordant Arbitration, Standing Order 6). The Protocol was drafted to prevent a recurrence: where the Board cannot decide by argument, it decides by pitch.

"No dispute shall be held unresolved while an approved surface remains unsounded."

— Protocol of Resonant Arbitration, Clause 1

The drafters drew directly on the frequency schedule fixed by The Protocol of Resonant Description, which assigns to the Resonant Staircase a range from R1 at 65.41 Hz to R233 at 246.94 Hz. The Protocol's first annex adopts that schedule wholesale, on the reasoning — never satisfactorily explained in the record — that a disputant's pitch should be drawn from a set of steps already agreed to be resonant.

Procedure

A petition is filed with the Department of Vertical Arbitration, which checks it against General Administrative Protocol Annex G-7: On Resonant Proximity before forwarding it to the Registry. The Registry assigns a frequency, a surface, and an attending clerk. At the appointed hour the surface is struck once. The disputants are seated at equal distance from it. Whoever speaks first is recorded as having spoken first, and the question of whether this constitutes an answer is left to the Warden of Boundary Arbitration.

Where the disputants speak simultaneously, the matter is referred to a Verification Arbitration, a procedural consequence that has generated more secondary litigation than the Protocol itself. The Registry's practice note of 9 Verge, Concordance 199, records that simultaneous speech occurred in forty-one of the first hundred hearings, and that thirty-eight of those referrals were subsequently withdrawn on the grounds that the disputants had spoken at a distance from the surface that the Registry had not been told about. Petitioners are now asked to declare all distances in advance. They are also asked not to lean on the tuning-plate.

The Kaelen objection

In the winter of the year recorded as 31,102, the auditor Kaelen of the Ninth Register raised a formal objection: that the Protocol measured not conviction but proximity, and that a tall disputant enjoyed an unearned advantage by virtue of a shorter path from mouth to surface. The Registry's response, filed as Annex 4, conceded the physics and disputed the relevance, observing that "the Protocol does not determine who is right; it determines who is first, which is a smaller claim and easier to prove" (Registry of Resonant Frequencies, Annex 4). Kaelen's audit led to an investigative plenum under the Protocol for Interstitial Grievance Arbitration (7th Revision), which upheld the Protocol and recommended only that seating be standardised. The seating standard has not been revised since. The chairs are of a single height.

Scholarly disagreement

The Protocol's authority rests on a contested reading of Concordance 17-B, the source of the practice of Provenance Arbitration. The Office of Concordant Arbitration holds that 17-B authorises resonant settlement as a form of provenance claim, since a sound belongs to the floor that first produces it. The Jurisdictional Arbitration office holds the opposite: that 17-B is confined to holdings, that sound is not a holding, and that the Protocol therefore has no basis in Concordance at all. Both offices cite the same clause and neither has withdrawn. The dispute is presently before the Arbitration Hearing convened at Floor 4,000, which has itself been unable to agree on whether it has jurisdiction.

A third view, advanced by the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation, maintains that the Protocol is sound in law but was ratified a day early, and that all hearings held under it should be re-run on the corrected date. The Subbureau has been asked to supply the corrected date. It has not done so.

Inventory of approved surfaces

The Protocol schedules four resonant surfaces, each with its assigned band. The schedule is reproduced here as it stands; the fourth entry was added by amendment and its band has never been agreed.

• The Resonant Alcove — plate, Band Gamma-7.
• Floor 8,844 tuning-plate — plate, Band Gamma-7.
• Steps R1 to R233 of the Resonant Staircase — struck surface, whole schedule.
• Floor 4,000 vestibule bell — bell, band unassigned.

Hearings on the vestibule bell are suspended. The bell is rung for other purposes and the Registry has not established which ring is which.