The acoustics of the “Witches Valley”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the legend, witches were women with magical knowledge that with the use of herbs cured illnesses and performed spells. In 1639, the book “De Nuce Maga Beneventana” described how the place where the “witches” gathered was an area south of the city of Benevento in South Italy in a long and narrow gorge. This valley with high rock walls was called the “stretto di Barba”. According to the legend, under a walnut tree in the “stretto di Barba”, the Longobards were used to perform sacred rituals. To make the rituals more effective, the sounds were amplified by the narrow gorge with flat and parallel rock walls where the sound reflections generated echoing effects. The aim of this paper is to investigate the soundscape of the “stretto di Barba” and to investigate if it has the acoustic characteristics that create echoes and to confirm the legends about the Longobards’ rituals. In situ measurements were carried out. Numerical simulations were carried out using the acoustic software Odeon. The paper shows that if a place where the Longobards carried out their rituals really existed, then the “stretto di Barba” had all the proper acoustic characteristics to create multiple sound reflections and echoes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".