Scholiast Pattern Resonator

The Scholiast Pattern Resonator is a marginal-notation instrument of the Standard Resonator class, distinguished from other patterns by its function of recording disagreement rather than agreement. Where a conventional resonator registers a single sustained tone and its deviations, the Scholiast Pattern registers the deviations as the principal signal and treats the tonic as commentary. Instruments of this pattern are mounted in scriptoria, recension rooms, and the annotation galleries of the upper reading floors, where their purpose is to preserve the precise moment at which two copies of a text ceased to say the same thing.

The pattern is first attested in the inventory of Floor 4,412 (the Annotators' Landing), in a schedule dated to the third recension of the Eleventh Concordance. It has been amended twice since, once to correct the placement of the deviation stylus and once to correct the correction.

Construction and principle

The Scholiast Pattern departs from the sympathetic arrangements used in the Sympathetic Resonator and the Spengler Resonator in that it is deliberately detuned against its reference fork. A resonator that agrees perfectly with its fork produces, on a Scholiast Pattern, no audible output at all; the instrument is silent precisely when the text before it is faithful. This is regarded by its operators as correct behaviour and by most other operators as a fault.

The instrument carries a single deviation stylus, graduated in what the Office of the Commissioner for Harmonic Integrity designates scholia — a unit equal to one two-hundred-and-fortieth of a semitone, chosen because it is the smallest interval a trained annotator can be shown to have noticed. Readings above forty scholia require the attendance of a second annotator, who signs the drum. Readings above one hundred and twenty are entered in the Marginal Register and are not discussed at meals.

Calibration follows the standard sequence for the class, with the Integration stage performed manually. Resonator-Adjuncts assigned to Scholiast instruments are cautioned that the nodal points of the Chronostatic Resonator are adjusted by other hands and on other floors, and that a stylus which appears to drift during Integration is usually reporting a genuine discrepancy somewhere above.

The Winter of Floor 4,412

The pattern's reputation rests chiefly on an incident of the winter of the Long Recess, when the Annotators' Landing held two recensions of the same glossary, differing by a single letter, for nineteen days. The duty instrument recorded continuously and the drum log for that period is preserved in the Archive of Marginalia as Exhibit 6, a document of some forty feet.

On the eleventh day the log shows a reading of two hundred and six scholia, sustained for four hours. No annotator was on the floor. The Resonator-Adjunct Kael is recorded as having counteracted the deviation remotely, in his capacity as Principal Dimensional Liaison, by the adjustment of a Latent Resonator elsewhere in the building; the log notes the correction and, beneath it, in another hand, "disagreed."

"Where the instrument and the text are at variance, the instrument is to be believed until the text is collated. Where the instrument and the collator are at variance, the collator is to be believed until the instrument is recalibrated. Both parties are to be present at recalibration."

— Office of the Commissioner for Harmonic Integrity, Circular 88, annex on marginal instruments

The collator in question, Senior Annotator Vessin Marrow, declined to attend and submitted instead a note of protest running to eleven pages, which was accepted, filed, and answered by a note of equal length four years later. The two notes are now kept together and are the most consulted holdings on the floor.

Dispute over the tonic

There is a standing disagreement between the Office of the Commissioner for Harmonic Integrity and the Bureau of Civil Cycles as to whether the tonic register of a Scholiast Pattern ought to be maintained at all. The Commissioner's position, set out in Circular 88, is that the tonic is a necessary reference and must be kept audible at all times. The Bureau's position, advanced in a memorandum prepared under the direction of the Resonator-Adjunct who leads it, is that a reference tone audible during annotation has a demonstrable effect on the annotator's judgement and that the tonic should be sounded only at the close of a session, in the manner of the Resonator Bell.

The dispute has produced no ruling. Both offices continue to inspect the same floors, and the instruments on Floor 4,412 are fitted with a tonic damper that is neither authorised nor removed. It has been described in inspection reports for sixty years as "present, condition good."

Prohibited use

Scholiast Pattern instruments are not to be used to settle disputes between persons, only between texts. The prohibition dates from an incident in which a resonator was asked to adjudicate a question of precedence between two doors and returned a reading of three hundred and eleven scholia, which both parties claimed as favourable. The instrument was retired to the Gallery of Retired Instruments and the doors were rehung at the same height, which resolved nothing but ended the matter.

Instruments on loan to visiting recension parties must be returned to their mountings by the close of the floor's day, and the stylus replaced point-downward in its rest. The rest is shallow and the point is fine.