For you, the Grail

The acoustics laboratory at Cambridge University sat within a Victorian brick building, afternoon sunlight streaming through tall windows onto precision instruments. Dr Gemma Clayton was deeply absorbed in analysing data from a 14th-century Gothic cathedral, her eyes fixed on complex waveform patterns across her computer screen. As Europe's leading authority on medieval architectural acoustics, the 33-year-old had an almost obsessive sensitivity to every frequency variation.

Gemma had possessed a...