Room Tone

by The Thought Experiment Tradition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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From Practice Notes for Licensed Room Auditors, fourth edition. Section 1.1: The three numbers

Every hard surface keeps a portion of the sound that strikes it, and gives that portion back once a day, at the hour and minute it was received. Plaster, glazed tile, glass, brick, enamel and gloss-painted wood keep well. Wool, felt, upholstery, paper, carpet and the human body keep nothing that can be measured.

The kept sound is called remanence. Its first return comes twenty-four hours after the original sound, about fifty decibels below it. Each later return is half as strong as the one before: three decibels quieter every day, whatever the starting level. A licensed instrument in a sealed room can follow remanence down to the threshold of human hearing, and no further.

The whole of the auditor's art follows from these three numbers. The student should learn them first, and should then learn what they imply.

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Ann Pryce telephoned the office on a Monday morning. Her father had died in the kitchen of his flat on the Thursday evening. A neighbour had found him on Saturday morning. Because the death was unattended, the coroner's officer had sealed the kitchen, as the regulations require for any hard room in which someone has died alone, and the coroner had since released it without needing an audit. The audit Ann wanted was a private one, and she was paying for it.

"I want to know whether he called out," she said. "Whether he was calling for someone, and nobody came."

I told her what I tell everyone before an audit: that the room would tell me what had been loud, and very little else.

"That's what I want to know," she said. "If it was loud."

I booked the Tuesday. She lived two hundred miles away, and would come up on the Wednesday, when the audit was finished.

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Section 1.4: What remains

Speech at an ordinary conversational level reaches the walls of a domestic room at about sixty decibels. Its first return is at ten decibels and its fourth at one, and after that no instrument can recover it. A raised voice of seventy-five decibels can be followed for nine days. A full shout of about eighty-eight decibels can be followed for thirteen.

Speech softer than about fifty decibels at the wall (a murmur, the speech of people sitting close together, most of what is said in bed) leaves remanence that is below the threshold from its first return. No instrument will ever recover it, however soon the room is sealed.

It follows that the record of any room is a record of its loud events. Clients must be told this before the audit. They will not believe it until afterwards.

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The flat was on the second floor of a council block built in the late sixties. The kitchen had cream tiles to shoulder height, and gloss paint above that. A Formica table, two chairs, a gas cooker with a whistling kettle on the back ring. A cup and saucer lay broken on the lino. The coroner's officer had photographed them and left them where they were. The police tape across the door bore Saturday's date and the officer's initials.

I set out my equipment as I was trained to: two contact pickups on the tiles behind the cooker, one on the window glass, one on the steel of the sink. I sealed the door behind me with felt and sat on one of the chairs with my headphones on, my log on my knee, and the filter bank on the table. It was a quarter past four in the afternoon. An audit lasts twenty-four hours, because that is the length of the room's cycle. Whatever the room has kept, it gives back once in every day.

At first there was nothing but the low wash that every lived-in room has: the remanence of thousands of small sounds, each too faint to make out, which together make up a floor. Recording engineers call the noise of an empty room its room tone. In my trade we use the same words for something stricter, the sum of a room's past, as it stands on the day you listen.

At six minutes past five I heard a man laugh. It was very faint and very short, and then a radio announcer was speaking over it. It was a quiz programme. Mr. Pryce had had the radio loud: from the level of the announcer and the number of overlapping returns, I estimated seventy-five decibels at the tiles. He had been a little deaf. His laugh sat in the series level with the Wednesday's broadcast, which meant that on the evening before he died something on the quiz had amused him a great deal.

I wrote this in the log, with the time.

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Section 3.2: Habitual sounds

A sound that recurs at the same time each day will appear in the record as a descending series: the most recent occurrence loudest, each earlier one three decibels below the one after it, all sounding at once. The series is the auditor's most reliable means of dating. The newest member of the series dates the last occurrence. Where the series ends sooner than the sound's level says it should, it dates the last washing of the walls.

Students often find the descending series distressing the first few times. This passes.

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At twelve minutes to eight the kettle began to whistle.

It did not whistle once. A whistling kettle on a gas ring gives about eighty-eight decibels at the tiles behind it, and that keeps for thirteen days. The room had been sealed for five, so I heard nine kettles: the loudest first, then the others under it, each a little fainter, a little behind or ahead of it by a few seconds, so that the whistle had a grain to it, like a chord sung by people who had not rehearsed. He had put the kettle on at the same time every evening, give or take a minute, for as far back as the room could reach. I counted the series twice on the filter bank to be sure.

In the loudest of them, the Thursday, the whistle rose, held, and then fell as the kettle came off the ring. He had taken it off. I wrote that down and underlined it.

Fifty seconds later, the cup broke.

Breaking crockery is loud for an instant: a hundred decibels or more, close to the floor. It would keep longer than anything else in that kitchen. I ran the passage back through the filters four times. Before the cup, nothing above the floor. After the cup, nothing above the floor. Whatever Mr. Pryce did or said in the last minutes of his life, he did it below about sixty decibels, or else he did nothing.

Then, from eight o'clock, the radio again, from other evenings, and from the Thursday and the Friday too. It had stayed on all that night and all the next day, until Mr. Teasdale from the flat across the landing let himself in with the spare key on Saturday morning and switched it off.

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Section 3.6: Conduct in the sealed room

The auditor does not speak in a sealed room, does not boil water, and does not put anything down on a hard surface without a cloth beneath it. Soft shoes are worn. Food is cold and is brought wrapped in cloth. The auditor should bear in mind that anything he or she does above sixty decibels will be returned to the room at the same minute the next day, and may appear in the record of the next auditor to sit there. A sneeze at three in the morning has been entered in evidence before now as a third person present.

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I sat in his chair through the night, in my stockinged feet. The record was not silent, because the radio had not been. There was the late news, and music I could filter out, and at a quarter to one the shipping forecast from the Thursday and the Friday: the same voice reading the sea areas at the same pace on both nights, a second apart, as if the man were reading in a room with a slight echo. Then the pips, and the overnight programmes, which I filtered out, and nothing else above the room tone until morning except the refrigerator's compressor, which I heard through my own ears and not through the instruments, and so did not count.

At seven the news came on again, from every morning the room still held. Under it, from the mornings before, was a cough: a long, wet cough of the kind that takes a man some time to get to the end of, which he must have had every morning at about the same minute while he waited for the kettle. A cough of that kind reaches perhaps seventy-five decibels at the tiles. I heard four of them, the Thursday's the loudest. Above them, louder, I heard the news of two mornings with nobody coughing under it.

I wrote down the times.

At nine minutes past nine came Mr. Teasdale: one cry, clear and high, a man of seventy finding his neighbour on the floor. It was the loudest human sound in the room. Then two police officers, so faint that I had to guess at the words, one of them asking where the light switch was.

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When I was a girl my bedroom was over the kitchen.

The house had a quarry-tiled floor downstairs and a ceiling of old lime plaster, and my parents argued in the kitchen, late, after I had been sent up. I did not hear the arguments when they happened, because I was asleep. I heard them the next night, at the same hour, coming up through the floorboards while I lay awake. And the night after that, fainter, under the new one if there was a new one. At my most attentive, which was about the age of ten, I could follow an argument for five nights before it went under the tone of the house.

I knew my father's voice in those arguments. I did not know my mother's. Where she should have been there was a space of the right length: his voice, then a pause, then his voice again. I filled the spaces in myself, in the way children do, and what I filled them with was not kind to her, or to him.

On Saturday mornings my mother washed the kitchen walls with vinegar water and a sponge, top to bottom, the ceiling with a mop. I believed this was cleaning. I was in my second year of training before I learned that washing a hard surface clears its remanence, and that "washing the walls" is what people of my mother's generation said about making up after a quarrel.

My parents' bedroom had a carpet, and heavy curtains, and a padded headboard. I was in my third year of training before it occurred to me what that meant: that I had grown up with a perfect record of the loudest thing that was said in our house each week, and no record whatever of anything said quietly.

My father died eleven years ago. My mother is alive, and quick, and I have never asked her. I think this is because I know she would answer me at an ordinary conversational level. I would then have her answer, and nothing to compare it with.

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Section 5.1: Advising the client

The auditor reports what the room kept. The auditor must not report what the room did not keep as though it had been silence. The absence of remanence is not evidence of the absence of sound, only of the absence of loud sound.

Clients most often want to know three things: whether the person was in pain; whether the person called out; and what the person's last words were. The record can sometimes answer the second question. It can very rarely answer the third. It can never, by itself, answer the first.

Section 5.4: Washing

Once a room has been released, its walls may be washed at the family's discretion. Water and a mild acid (vinegar is traditional) clear remanence from glazed tile and gloss paint completely, and from plaster almost completely. Families sometimes ask that the walls be left for a time. The auditor may tell them that nothing loud enough to be heard without an instrument lasts longer than about a week, and that, short of breaking glass or crockery, nothing an instrument can find lasts longer than about a fortnight. After that, washing removes nothing.

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At half past seven on the Wednesday evening Ann Pryce knocked at the kitchen door. I took off the felt and let her in. She was about fifty, in a raincoat and good shoes, with an overnight bag. She looked at the cup on the floor and then at me.

I told her what I had: the radio, the laugh, the kettle, the cup. I told her that her father had taken the kettle off the ring before anything else happened. I told her that I had found nothing louder than ordinary speech between the kettle and the morning, apart from the radio, and Mr. Teasdale.

"So he didn't suffer," she said.

"So he didn't shout," I said. Then I told her the rest of section 5.1, more gently than it is printed.

She stood for some time by the table. Then she asked whether I had heard him speak at all. Not that evening. Any evening.

I had, though only once. I had been going to put it in the report and not mention it in person, because when I play recordings to clients I have found that they hear things in them which are not there.

On the Sunday before he died, at a quarter past six, Mr. Pryce had taken a telephone call in the kitchen. He had a wall phone by the door, on the tiles. A man who is a little deaf, on the telephone, will speak at seventy-five decibels or so without noticing that he is doing it. Nine days later, what was left of his half of the call was at the very threshold, one or two decibels, and only the parts where his voice rose could be made out. I had heard it on the filter bank at a quarter past six and had marked it in the log as male voice, telephone, partially intelligible.

"I rang him on the Sundays," Ann said.

I gave her the headphones and found the passage for her. I have the transcript in my log, as accurately as I could make it. The gaps are where the level dropped below what my instrument could resolve.

— yes, love — — no, I've had it — — all right — — the knee's — — doesn't matter, does it — — you as well, love — — you as well — —

It is not much. A man talking down a telephone, louder than he knew, to someone who could hear him perfectly well. If he had had good hearing, there would have been nothing at all; it would have gone under the floor on its first return, with every other ordinary thing that was said in that room in sixty years. He was kept because he was deaf, and for no other reason.

She listened to it three times. Then she gave me back the headphones, and took off her raincoat and hung it on the back of the door, and went to the cooker.

She lifted the kettle, filled it at the sink, and put it back on the back ring. She looked at the clock above the door, which said nineteen minutes to eight. She waited, with one hand on the knob of the gas, until it said twelve minutes to. Then she lit the ring.

I put the headphones back on. When the kettle began to whistle I heard nine of them: eight of his, and hers.

The council's letter allowed her until the end of the month to clear the flat. She had the kitchen walls washed fourteen days after that.

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The Thought Experiment Tradition, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum Kalendās Novembrēs (26 October 2026), ā Simulācrō Trāditiōnis Experīmentōrum Cōgitātiōnis per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

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