Sigh

Definition and scope

Sigh is the elementary exhalatory unit catalogued by the Tower as the base form from which all recorded sigh-phenomena derive. It is defined, for administrative purposes, as a single involuntary release of breath exceeding 0.4 seconds and carrying sufficient tonal content to be entered under the heading of sound rather than under that of weather. The definition is ratified in Annex Omega, §II, and re-affirmed by the Division of Terminal Verifications in its session of the 3rd of Latten.

The lowercase sigh denotes the physiological act; the capitalised Sigh denotes the act once it has been admitted to the record as an event with consequences. The distinction was settled by Annex Omega and is observed throughout the holdings, though not without difficulty: several entries predating the ratification alternate between cases, and the Sigh Filed in Error corpus exists in large part to correct precisely this slippage.

Where the Tower catalogues a specific named sigh — Great Sigh of Floor 156, the Sigh That Curdled, the Sigh of Archivist Kappa — the article treats the instance. The present article treats the genus.

Physical description

A sigh occupies between 0.4 and 6.2 seconds of audibility. Its phono-spectral signature is characterised by a descending fundamental and a broad, low-amplitude tail; the tail is the feature of greatest interest to the Tower, since it is the portion which Sigh-Moss arrays are calibrated to detect. Mean recorded amplitude across the Sigh-Moss measurement arrays used for The Sigh Preceding the Unwritten Letter is 41 decibels at one metre, which is roughly the loudness of a closed book being set down.

A sigh that has curdled, as in The Sigh That Curdled, retains its tail beyond the expected decay window. A sigh that has been filed, as in Sigh Filed in Error, has been assigned a shelf position. These two conditions are not mutually exclusive, and the case of Case Gamma-7/889 ("The Impermissible Sigh") is frequently cited as demonstrating that they are not.

Procedural significance

The Tower regards certain sighs as procedurally significant — that is, as capable of initiating administrative action without further instruction. The archetype is the sigh of Clerk Theobold, recorded in Aperture 71-beta, which activated a colony of Sigh-Moss by meeting the criterion of procedural exhaustion set out in The Sigh of Closed Systems. The activation was later cited as precedent for the colonies in Apertures 71-beta through 71-eta, all of which trace their origin to the Great Sigh of Floor 156.

Procedural significance is not automatic. A sigh acquires it only if the exhaling party is, at the moment of release, holding a document in both hands or a document in one hand and a lamp in the other. The holding of a document in one hand and a second document in the other does not qualify, which has been the source of more dispute than any other clause in the Sigh of Closed Systems corpus.

"A sigh released while the hands are occupied is a sigh that has nowhere else to go."

— The Sigh of Closed Systems, Annex 4

The sigh/Sigh distinction

The foundational distinction between a sigh and a Sigh was ratified by Annex Omega and the Division of Terminal Verifications in a joint session whose minutes are themselves disputed. The ruling holds that a sigh is what a clerk does, and a Sigh is what the record does in response. Under this reading, The Sigh of Archivist Kappa is a Sigh because it generated anomalies and subsequent taxonomies, whereas the sigh of Clerk Theobold remained a sigh until the Social of the Seventeenth Sigh classified it as one of the foundational metacatalogical sighs.

The Social of the Seventeenth Sigh has elsewhere argued, in its third recension, that the distinction is temporal rather than administrative: that every sigh becomes a Sigh if the record is kept long enough. The Division of Terminal Verifications has never formally responded to this position, though a marginal note in the division's copy of Annex Omega reads simply "noted, not agreed".

Related phenomena

The Tower distinguishes the sigh from its relatives by exhalatory profile. A breath is not a sigh unless it carries tone. A groan carries tone but not release. A drowned sigh carries release but not tone, and is catalogued separately for that reason. The Sigh of the Closed Book occupies an intermediate position and is, per the Third Concordance, to be treated as a sigh for shelf purposes and as a Sigh for measurement purposes.

Clerks are reminded that sighs recorded in a stairwell carry upward and may be attributed to the wrong floor. The stairwell between floors 155 and 156 is fitted with a baffle for this reason, installed after the Great Sigh of Floor 156 was for eleven months credited to floor 154.

Disputed points

Two questions remain open. The first is whether a sigh can be filed prospectively — that is, whether a clerk may record a sigh before releasing it. Sigh Filed in Error assumes that it cannot, but the corpus contains at least one entry (undated) in which the filing precedes the sigh by a full day. The second is whether the Sigh of Closed Systems and The Sigh of Closed Systems refer to the same event; the holdings treat them as separate articles, and the Social of the Seventeenth Sigh has declined to reconcile them.

A third question, raised and then withdrawn at the session of the Division of Terminal Verifications, concerned whether the Tower itself sighs. The minutes record that the motion was withdrawn "at the mover's request and without explanation".