SCP-4445.

Item #: SCP-4445

Object Class: Thaumiel

Special Containment Procedures: SCP-4445 is contained within a modified maximum security containment housing at Area-90’s Eisenhower Complex. SCP-4445 is to be constantly monitored to ensure proper functionality of the device. Oversight of the Eisenhower Complex and SCP-4445 is currently under the direction of Operations Controller Dr. Wyatt Atwood and Systems Operations Manager Dr. Leah Vance.

SCP-4445’s housing is to be closely inspected and maintained by a team of engineers, many of whom work outside the Foundation in the private and public sector and are not aware of the anomalous nature of SCP-4445. To this end, the acting disinformation campaign for SCP-4445, codenamed “McLean Protocol”, is that SCP-4445 is a piece of equipment used to perform spectral analysis on extraterrestrial mineral samples for Project Lancelot, an academic Foundation front used to recruit qualified personnel for work on SCP-4445.

Per the terms of the McLean Protocol, non-Foundation personnel assigned to SCP-4445 are to be overseen by staff managers to ensure that their work does not cross into other areas of the device, to ensure that no individual becomes aware of the full scope of SCP-4445’s functionality. Non-staff personnel who become aware of SCP-4445’s true nature are to be remanded to the on-site amnestics team and returned to service as soon as possible.

SCP-4445 is designed to maintain a constant Melodia/Harmonia Resonance Approximation Value (M/HRAV) of 945.2. Fluctuations in the M/HRAV output of SCP-4445 are not unusual, though excessive fluctuations1 are capable of producing causal variations and often must be addressed by Foundation disinformation teams. Due to the SCP-4445 team’s ability to better predict fluctuations in the device’s operation, the likelihood of these fluctuations resulting in a breach of informational awareness is low.

Though unexpected, emergency protocols exist for instances of excessive variation in SCP-4445’s M/HRAV output. Assigned Foundation personnel are to familiarize themselves with both the Viceroy Protocol and the Aldermann Protocol, and Level 4 researchers and directors are to familiarize themselves with the Eleven-or-Below Protocol, as described in the Area-90 Emergency Procedures manual.

A section of SCP-4445's Resonance Tuner Array.

Description: SCP-4445 is an Adjusted “Atwood-Noriega” Causal Harmonic Resonance Amplifier, built by the Project Fleetwood team in June of 1959. SCP-4445 uses several powerful arcane and thaumatological elements to create a Melodia/Harmonia Resonance Approximation Field with a radius in excess of 240,000km. SCP-4445 is designed to reinforce the causal and conceptual manifestations of melody and harmony that constitute music.

SCP-4445 is roughly 27.5m in height, and is composed of a vast and complicated array of implements designed to mimic the conditions under which the Melodia/Harmonia Resonance occurs naturally. It is fed by a geothermal power supply beneath Area-90, and is surrounded by an array of M/H Resonance tuners designed to track the fluctuations in SCP-4445’s output. Additionally, a series of long antennae run roughly 1km into the Earth below SCP-4445, and around it at regular intervals to reduce noise generated by the mechanical components of the Amplifier.

Addendum 4445-1: Trinity Zero and the Development of SCP-4445 [REVISED 1/19/2004]

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SCP-4445 was constructed by Foundation engineers in response to the Trinity-Zero Event that took place on February 3rd, 1959, when a plane carrying American rock and roll musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa, killing all three men. This event had an immediate and disastrous impact on the conceptual stability of melodic and harmonic constructs over the following weeks.

The Trinity-Zero event was, in fact, the culmination of a series of drops in the universal background Melodia/Harmonia Resonance2 throughout the last several months of 1958 and the first weeks of 19593.

Due to the nature of the Melodia/Harmonia Resonance failure, it was not immediately apparent to the general population that they were losing the ability to perceive music as an abstract. As Foundation disinformation campaigns began calling the date of the collapse a day of mourning, the changes in perception were either unrecognized or otherwise overlooked. The disinformation teams ran stories about “general depression” and pushed audiences worldwide to ignore the changes they were experiencing.

Addendum 4445-2: Foreward by Dr. Isaac Atwood, “Project Proposal: FLEETWOOD - A General Analysis and Reconstruction of Large Scale Failure Events Concerning M/H Resonance” [REVISED 1/19/2004]

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Addressed to: Dr. D. Wilmer, Dr. G Olan, Dr. Q. W. Banks, Dr. A. Bright, Dr. V. Timar, Dr. S. Garrison, Dr. L. Sasora, Director Beason, Director Lanks, Director Westwood, Director Caliban, Director Mont Blanc, Regional Director St. Luke, Regional Director Kervus, O5-1, O5-2, O5-7, O5-9, O5-11

From: Dr. Isaac Atwood, Site-10

Colleagues,

I’m sure you’re all well aware of the steps being taken now to address the Trinity-Zero Event. This MK-Class Resonance Failure is both unanticipated and unprecedented. We are already seeing its effects as the general population’s interest in organized sound continues to decrease, and steps must be taken if we wish to recover.

It is not unlikely that the shift in perception will be unnoticed for most people, though unemployment rates for those within the music industry will undoubtedly skyrocket as they too begin to experience the shift resulting from the Resonance Failure. This change is affecting all people at different rates, but mark my words when I say that before long all will find themselves unable to properly identify the difference between noise and music.

While this is not something our team believes is life-threatening to our species as a whole, we do believe that music is something intrinsic to human nature, and the two should not be separated. We evolved over millions of years alongside the Resonance, and in time we grew into beings who could truly benefit from its gifts. And we are only in our infancy! The Resonance has allowed us the gift of more than what words could give - it has given us a true expression of the soul. A way for us to reach others and touch their hearts with the same raw emotion as our own. It is not just how we perceive music, it is our creative muse! It changes the world, and it changes us!

We find that it is intolerable to suggest an existence that does not include mankind and the Resonance. The resulting mankind would be incomprehensibly different than our baseline, and we find this wholly outside the bounds of normalcy.

To that end, we propose the following: the construction of a great machine that will breathe life back into the Resonance, at least so far as we can perceive it. We have already begun prototyping this device to great success, and we think scaling it up will be sufficient to return the resonance field around our planet to its baseline.

Let me be clear - our plans include thaumatological elements. There is no way to step around this, the technology simply does not exist. However, utilizing elements we have recovered from raids on Fifthist sects along the West Coast, we believe that we can generate a strong enough amplifier to stand in as a surrogate resonance field, until such time that the natural field rebounds to its previous levels.

You’ll find attached our schematics and a detailed plan of action. We hope you consider approving our project, before the damage that has been done is irreversible.

Thank you.

Addendum 4445-3: Log of Causal Abnormalities Resulting From Fluctuations in SCP-4445’s Resonance [REVISED 1/19/2004]

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The following is a log of events that have taken place in correlation to SCP-4445’s fluctuations. Whether these events are the result of causal alterations or simply coincidence is the result of an ongoing investigation.

ID #
Event Description
M/HRAV Variation
Length of Variation

001
Relatively unknown hip-hop article X-Aight begins recording “No Sir”, an album that will later sell 25,000 copies and cement X-Aight’s place in the Toronto hip-hop scene.
+11.4
31 hours

017
Whitney Houston sings “The Star Spangled Banner” at Super Bowl XXV.
+1934
2 minutes, 15 seconds

023
Suicide bomber in Kuwait detonates near a public library, which collapses and destroys an entire catalog of rare, regional vinyl records.
-49.9
8.4 seconds

064
Electronic musician “Vektroid” records and publishes the album Floral Shoppe, launching the genre of Vaporwave into the mainstream consciousness.
+76.0
Fluctuation for 14 weeks.

101
May 24th, 2006. Unknown event.
-54.1
4 hours.

118
Brian Meadows, lead singer of the band “Monacker”, dies in apparent overdose.
-47.2
13 minutes

Addendum 4445-4: Note from Dr. Isaac Atwood to Dr. Cleo Bingham [NEW REVISION]

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The following note was recovered during the recovery of Dr. Cleo Bingham’s personal effects shortly after his death in 1994. Dr. Atwood had died seven years prior, and while the veracity of the penmanship has been confirmed, no other information regarding the contents of this note has ever surfaced from Dr. Atwood’s personal effects.

Cleo,

Thank you for responding to me so quickly. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure if you would. I know the atmosphere is difficult to navigate right now and there are eyes everywhere. I will do my best to be brief.

We lied during our presentation to the Overseer Council, and I fear they have not realized it. I fear this, because in many ways I had hoped we would’ve been caught in our deceit, and then the responsibility for our folly would’ve fallen on the shoulders of another. But they did not, and so we succeeded.

Our lie is this: the Resonance has not just failed, it has disappeared. The tuners we have designed to hear it no longer vibrate. The result is the same from those have attached to satellites, deep in space. This is a total collapse of the abstract construct that constitutes music.

But the machine will work. We can turn it on and we will hear the music again, just as clearly as we ever did before. But they finally got me, Cleo. I swore I would make a career here without ever having to do something horrible, but we didn’t find anything in that Fifthist raid. We took something. Cut the song out of a singer’s still beating heart. I can still hear it, Cleo - I wish you would’ve gotten the chance to. It was summer and warm breezes and a blue sky all at once. It was the last pure song on this Earth and the last breath of the Resonance, and we cut it out and stitched it into our machine and told it to sing that same song.

God, you should’ve heard it when we started it up. Like a sea of cellos warming up in unison. Long, drawn strokes across a bow, sweeping yarns and wide stretches of humming strings. Behind it all, the song. Magnificent.

But it won’t keep playing forever. It’s just a machine, and it will wear out. We’ve made it secure - they could drop a thousand A-bombs on top of it and it wouldn’t crack the shell. But eventually it will stop playing and then there won’t be music afterwards. Can you imagine that, Cleo? Think about it for a moment. Can you imagine it?

They’re saying it was Buddy Holly, you know. They think he died last, and they’ve timed the drop up with when it happened. He must have had something really special in the works, that his death killed the concept of music forever.

We’ve got it on life support, but truthfully Cleo, one of these days the music is going to go out for good. There just aren't enough of us left who heard the song, and who know how the machine works. It's going to be gone; not in my lifetime, or the lifetime of anyone alive today. But there’s going to come a day when the music dies. A day when the light goes out.

What happens then?

Footnotes

1. Such as the 79 M/HRAV spike on March 15th, 2004 or the 114 M/HRAV dip on May 29th, 1997.

2. From Dr. Isaac Atwood’s Tracking the Physical Manifestations of Abstract Conceptualizations: “Human beings perceive sound like other animals - out of necessity. Sound alerts us to dangers or comforts and provides valuable input about the world around us. Music is an altogether different phenomenon; it is organized sound. Sound that we are able to interpret as something more than just communication, or sensory input. This is only capable because of a recently discovered phenomenon, the Melodia/Harmonia resonance. It is pressure wave - similar to sound but not audible to humans - that affects the way the brain perceives sound. How this is accomplished is unknown; it is believed that the chemistry of the subject’s brain is changed by the introduction of a subvalue pressure, altering the basic principles of the subject’s sensory input. Subjects deprived of this input do not recognize music as an abstract, and are unable to discern the difference between organized sound and other noise.

3. The first M/H Resonance tuners were designed by a team of researchers working for the Kylman Observatory in Berlin in 1954 who managed to design a device that could calculate changes in a subject’s brain activity when listening to a single note on a strummed guitar, and then compare those changes over time to read a delta in background resonance. These early tuners were fairly crude instruments, and could generally not provide more information than “higher” or “lower” values than previous readings.

4. To date, the highest single spike in output from SCP-4445.