The Voices of the Places

Hell is heard before it is seen: just past the gate «quivi sospiri, pianti e alti guai risonavan per l’aere sanza stelle», and the first step of the second canto already tells you to go where the voices are thickest, so the voices are the compass. The game builds each canto’s floor out of three things: sources standing where the thing that sounds stands, one reverb tail per room, and banks of air inside the places. It holds from the valley down.

There is one rule, no blankets, and it was not chosen by ear but counted: you take the points along the route and at each one you count how many sources can be heard. In the valley five points out of fifteen were at zero, and they were the whole second half of the chapter, the crossing included: you stood on a boat, in the dark, in the middle of a river, in silence. In the five circles nothing came out mute, but twelve points out of twenty three heard one source only and it was always the same one, the sighs of Limbo, a hundred and thirty metres wide, which reached the Styx thirty eight metres further down and two cantos further on. Five circles covered by the same sound are one circle, and the sighs are now a ring of eight narrow sources out of phase with each other, because eight copies in phase beat together and from a distance become one throat again.

The tails tell the ear what place you are in before you see it, which is why in the fourth canto there are four different grammars: the city is walled, the landslide is a gut, the sand is open, and the wood does not resonate at all, the one deaf tail of the chapter. Two formulas were written for the middle chapters. The storm is not the loudest wind in the game, it is the only one with a whistle: over its body sits a resonant band pass whose centre sweeps between four hundred and fifteen hundred hertz, which is the band nothing else occupies in that canto. And the wailing is not one lament in a loop, which would be a metronome: it is seven laments at irregular places inside a single clip, laid through the wood of the suicides one voice every six thorn trees, beside the trunk and not on it, because breaking one would silence a piece of the wood and the price of marking your way would turn into a reward as well.