Sporadic Chime of Floor 317

Definition and Classification

The Sporadic Chime of Floor 317 is a Class IV irregular resonation phenomenon first recorded on Floor 317, 'The Annex of Unlisted Hours,' in Year 11,988 of the Tower Calendar. It is distinguished from the other irregular chimes of the middle stacks by three characteristics: it strikes without schedule, it strikes without a ringer, and it strikes only in rooms that are, at the moment of sounding, empty.

Under the classification scheme established by the Bureau of Resonant Phenomena, Class IV denotes phenomena "audible to instrumentation but not reliably audible to persons," a category the Sporadic Chime has occupied since the Fourth Concordance on Audible Phenomena, Annex 9, extended Class IV status retroactively to all chimes predating the scheme itself. The retroactivity was disputed for forty years and has not been revisited.

Recorded Behaviour

The Chime has been logged 1,214 times since systematic recording began, at a mean interval of 9.3 days and a standard deviation wide enough that the Office of Interval Statistics has twice declined to publish an expected-value table, citing "the risk of the table being believed."

Its acoustics are peculiar. Witnesses uniformly report the sound as occurring behind them, regardless of where they were standing when it reached the floor's survey chain; the Acoustic Survey of the Middle Stacks recorded twenty-two consecutive strikes, each of which arrived from the direction the listener had most recently turned away from. The survey's author, Second Surveyor Eldan Vourne, appended a note to the effect that he had turned in a full circle on the twenty-third strike and heard nothing, which he regarded as confirmation.

"The Chime does not arrive from a place. It arrives from a place the listener has abandoned. We have measured this. We cannot account for it, but we have measured it."

— Acoustic Survey of the Middle Stacks, Volume II, folio 41

A maintenance note pinned to the corridor board at 317 describes the recommended procedure as "standing still and waiting for it to finish," followed by the sentence "Do not knock on the walls to hurry it." The same note has not been replaced since Year 12,101.

Relation to Other Chimes

The Sporadic Chime has never been observed in the same hour as the Silent Chime, a mutual exclusion first noted by Third Archivist Miren Olvet in Year 12,204 and never explained. Olvet's paper proposed that the two phenomena draw on the same "chime-substance," a phrase for which she was formally criticized by the Office of Absolute Nomenclature and privately congratulated by two of its reviewers.

Unlike the Chime of Unanimity, housed on Floor 412 in the Third Chamber of Review, the Sporadic Chime has no designated chamber, no appointed custodian, and no registry of strikes maintained at the site itself; all its records are reconstructions assembled afterward at the Office of Interval Statistics from the survey chain and such witness testimony as the witnesses can still be induced to give. Unlike the Chime of Contested Harmony, it signals no departmental process and marks no moment of ratification.

The Bureau of Resonant Phenomena has on three occasions considered classifying the Chime as a degraded instance of The Seventh Chime, on the reasoning that both are scheduled-in-principle events whose schedule has been lost. Each attempt has been withdrawn before the third reading.

The Ruling of Year 12,266 and the Vexed Question of the Ringer

In the winter of Year 12,266, a junior recorder named Petra Anselm filed a formal notice asserting that a chime without a ringer is not a chime at all but a loose report, a category otherwise reserved for sounds attributed to settling masonry and the ventilation of the eastern stacks. Her notice relied on Article XII of the Second Concordance on Instruments, which defines a chime as "a deliberate sound caused to occur at a known hour by a known hand."

The Bureau's reply, issued the following spring under seal, conceded the definition and then declined to apply it, observing that the Chime had occurred 811 times by that date and that "a phenomenon which has occurred 811 times cannot conveniently be defined out of occurrence." The reply cited Article IV of the same Concordance, which provides that established fact supersedes definition where the two are in conflict — a clause the Second Concordance elsewhere forbids invoking against itself.

The ruling stands. Anselm was reassigned to the Floor 188 registry, where she remained for eleven years and where, by her own account, she heard the Chime twice.

Floor 317 and the Annex of Unlisted Hours

Floor 317's principal function is the storage of Hour-Residue, the residue of unclaimed hours collected from the Tower's scheduling disputes. The Annex reports that its offices are, on average, occupied 61 percent of the working day, and that the Chime has never once sounded in the remaining 39 percent of an occupied room. The discrepancy — that it sounds where no one is present to hear, yet is heard — is the subject of the Doctrine of Unlisted Witnesses, which holds that every empty room is nonetheless attended by a witness whose qualifications are not stated in the room's register.

Whether this witness is the intended listener of the Chime has not been settled. The Bureau's current position is that the question is "properly one for the office that keeps the register, which is not this Bureau."