About & credits · People and sources
How this work was made
An independent personal research project, directed and managed by Yishan Shen and produced with AI coding agents.
Direction and contributions
- Yishan ShenDirection and engineering management
Direction. Defined the study’s research questions, scope and phasing, supplied its original master plan and early project framework, and refined the plans with the agents through successive iterations.
Technical groundwork. Deployed and debugged software on which the work depends, and researched current web architecture to set the website’s technical direction.
Working method. Established the division of responsibilities among the agents, mandatory review of material steps by an agent other than the author, the allocation of models and effort according to task difficulty, and the checkpointing discipline that allows long-running work to resume without loss after a pause or handover.
Supervision. Steered the work throughout in sustained dialogue with the agents, by dated instructions retained in the project records: reviewing their reports, correcting course and guarding against drift, requesting verification that a change had left the rest of the work unaffected, setting priorities between strands of work, delegating decisions, and defining the standard the result had to meet.
Visual review. Reviewed the pages repeatedly, requesting revisions wherever typography, layout or imagery fell short of a finished standard.
This engineering management allowed AI coding agents to sustain a single long-running programme of work across many sessions.
- OpenAI CodexImplementation and review
- Working under that method, agents running GPT-6 Astra implement and review the work; one coordinates the others and integrates their results.
- Anthropic Claude CodeProduction and cross-review
- Claude Opus 5.5 implements and cross-reviews website work alongside the Codex agents.
- Authorship scope
Each phase was initiated by Yishan Shen and conducted under that method and supervision. Within it, AI coding agents developed the operational and design detail and produced the software, simulation runs, analysis, documentation and website; project records preserve authorship, models and independent reviews by dated phase. No other individual authorship, institutional affiliation or credential is claimed.
Independent review here means review by an agent other than the author. It is not a human listening study or on-site validation.
Attribution
Sources and credits
These sources support the study and the material used in this edition. Rendered appearance is credited separately from the simulation and its results. Third-party material remains under its own terms; the credits here grant no further rights.
The acoustic study
Taormina acoustics study, directed by Yishan Shen.
Project-generated geometry, acoustic results, maps and receiver values. Refer to the data release alongside any reused result, and retain its uncalibrated-model qualification.
Voice directivity
Christoph Pörschmann (2023). Supplementary material for “A database for the comparison of measured datasets of human voice directivity”, Forum Acusticum 2023, Torino. Zenodo.
Measured voice directivity, adapted into band-averaged directional patterns for the modelled speaking source. It supplies no absolute speech spectrum or historical speaker level.
Acoustic simulation
COMSOL Multiphysics® v. 6.4, COMSOL AB, Stockholm, Sweden.
The study’s geometric acoustic simulations. This edition presents their precomputed records.
Reconstruction scholarship
F. Gabellone, I. Ferrari and F. Giuri. The Greek-Roman Theater of Taormina: Towards a Reconstruction Proposal. CHNT.
Published reconstruction of the Roman stage wall and orchestra. A reconstruction proposal, not a recovered record of the complete ancient building. Cited, not reproduced.
Theatre outline
© OpenStreetMap contributors.
The mapped outline of the theatre (way 42403497). A circle fitted to its outer-wall arc gives the model its orchestra centre, its axis direction and the angular extent of its seating.
Map colour scales
viridis and RdBu_r colour scales as defined in Matplotlib 3.11.2. Copyright (c) 2012- Matplotlib Development Team; All Rights Reserved.
The colour lookup tables for the absolute value maps (viridis) and the matched contrast map (RdBu_r). The displayed colours follow the study’s published palette records.
Diverging colour scheme
ColorBrewer colour schemes, designed by Cynthia Brewer. Copyright (c) 2002 Cynthia Brewer, Mark Harrower, and The Pennsylvania State University.
The RdBu scheme behind the matched contrast colour scale.
Website build tools
Presentation stills
Blender 5.2.0 LTS
Retained Cycles passes rendered with OptiX and OpenImageDenoise, using the Khronos PBR Neutral view transform, recomposed with a transparent background. Both configurations share the camera and rendering treatment within each view. Images are a presentation of the model, not a reconstruction of historical materials or illumination.
Build record
Presentation stills: LIGHT-1 R3, Blender 5.2.0 LTS, build fbe6228777e7.
Terrain data
Terrain: Regione Siciliana - S.I.T.R., MDT 2 m, Volo ATA 2012-2013, produced by ICE-GEIE (Stereocarto SA and RPA s.r.l.).
Acquired through the SITR WCS service, then clipped and sampled for the acoustic model. These stills show a cropped, simplified layered greyboard presentation with a shared A/B display treatment.
Text and headings
Literata, The Literata Project Authors.
The edition’s text and headings, served with the site through Fontsource.
Navigation and tables
Inter, The Inter Project Authors.
Navigation, captions and tabular values, served with the site through Fontsource.
Font copyright notices and licence text
Copyright 2016 The Inter Project Authors (https://github.com/rsms/inter)
Copyright 2017 The Literata Project Authors (https://github.com/googlefonts/
This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1. This license is copied below, and is also available with a FAQ at: http://scripts.sil.org/OFL
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