Tuning Rod of Office

The Tuning Rod of Office is a ceremonial and, in limited circumstances, functional implement carried by sworn officers of the Librarians during sittings of the Concordance benches. It is a slender rod of drawn brass, 1.19 metres in length, terminating at the upper end in a two-tined fork cut to ring at 428 cycles per second. It is not a Rod of Resonance, though the two are constantly confused, and the Office of Ceremonial Custody has twice issued memoranda asking that the distinction be observed in writing. The Tuning Rod confers no authority in itself. It marks that authority is present, and it does so audibly.

Construction and the Two Tines

The rod is forged in one piece from Low Archive brass, a stock reserved for instruments that must not be repaired. The fork at the head is cut, not cast, and the spacing between the tines is specified at 41 millimetres in Fourth Concordance, Annex 9. The lower third of the shaft is wrapped in corded linen so that the rod may be struck against a bench edge without marring either. The linen is replaced at each sitting and is not recorded.

Different benches carry rods of slightly different pitch. The Ninth Bench rings at 431 cycles, the Bench of Quiet Claims at 424, and the difference is deliberate: a rod that rings at the wrong bench is the standard means by which a clerk discovers they have entered the wrong chamber. Seventh Concordance, Annex 2, permits this discovery but requires that the clerk withdraw without speaking.

Use at Sittings

An officer of the bench strikes the rod once against the bench edge to open a sitting and twice to close it. Between these, the rod rests in a shallow groove cut into the bench surface, tines pointing away from the presiding officer. It is not to be held while a Concordance is being read aloud, a prohibitions stated without explanation in Fourth Concordance, Annex 9 and repeated, with a different explanation, in the Twelfth Concordance.

The rod's fork is tuned to the room rather than to any standard. This is the source of its only true function. When a chamber has been altered — a door widened, a gallery shortened, a floor relaid — the rod will no longer sustain its ring for the expected duration, and the officer reports the deficiency to the Office of Acoustic Integrity before the sitting may proceed. A rod that rings short is not repaired. It is retired, and a new rod is cut to the altered room. The retired rods are stored upright in the Hall of Retired Rods on Floor 612, which holds 3,410 of them and has no cataloguer.

"Let the rod be struck, and let the room answer. If the room answers late, the room has been changed and the change must be declared."

— Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, clause 3

The Dispute of the Lent Rod

In the winter of the year recorded as 8,912 by the Office of Acoustic Integrity's primary ledger, a rod was lent from the Ninth Bench to the Bench of Quiet Claims for a sitting that could not be postponed. The rod rang at 431 cycles in a chamber tuned to 424. No participant objected, and the sitting concluded in the ordinary way. Six days later the Office of Ceremonial Custody filed an objection holding that a rod had opened a sitting to which it did not belong, and that everything decided therein was therefore opened but never properly begun.

The objection was referred to the Concordance of Precedence, which found for the objectors on a narrow ground: the rod had been carried through a corridor without a Transit Warrant, and the defect lay in the carrying and not in the ringing. The rulings of that sitting stand. The corridor has since been redesignated a chamber, so that the question cannot arise there again.

Sixth Concordance, Annex 14, holds the opposite view, asserting that a rod is inseparable from its bench and that lending is "a fiction maintained by convenience" (clause 7). The two documents have not been reconciled. Clerks cite whichever is nearer to hand.

Care and Handling

The rod is wiped with a dry cloth after each sitting and hung, not laid, between sittings. It is never to be sounded in the presence of the Standard Tuning Fork, Pattern Gamma, as the two instruments will beat against one another and produce a third tone for which no office is responsible. A rod that has been dropped is not sounded again until it has rested for one full day, a rule originating in an incident on Floor 701 that the record describes only as "the matter of the long afternoon" (Office of Ceremonial Custody, Ledger 3, entry 88).

Visiting officers from other floors may carry their own rod but must not strike it in a chamber where a rod is already present. The customary acknowledgment in such cases is a single nod, given in silence, by both officers, in the doorway.