6 chords in a gothic cathedral
Drawn above with its standard settings, which is almost never how an essay draws it: an essay states the numbers it is arguing about, so the figure a reader meets there is about that argument rather than about the drawing in general. Every option a placement passes is checked against the ones this function actually reads, because an option it does not read is silently ignored and the figure quietly draws what is above instead.
It makes a noise. 7 of its 7 placements carry sound, built from the same numbers as the drawing, offering these buttons: 4 chords at 0.375 a second, 5 chords at 0.5 a second, 5 chords at 0.75 a second, 6 chords at 1 a second, 8 chords at 2 a second.
Called by 2 essays
the blast radius of changing it
The room chooses the harmonic rhythm
A chord in a cathedral is still sounding, seven decibels down, when the next one arrives — and the one after that, and the one after that. Reverberation is linear in decibels, so the number of chords audible at once is one number divided by another, and it puts a hard ceiling on how fast a composer writing for that building can change harmony. The ceiling is computable, and the music written for those rooms sits under it.
A room does not decay evenly
Sabine's arithmetic gives one number and absorption is a strong function of frequency, so a room has six reverberation times rather than one. A stone church rings for 6.3 seconds at 125 hertz and 2.4 at 4 kilohertz, which means a chord left in it does not fade — it changes shape, losing its top before it loses its bottom, and arriving at the listener as a different sonority from the one played.