# ADR-0183: Lawful Audio→Lexeme Path (stub) **Status:** Proposed (stub — placeholder to record the fork; not yet a full design) **Date:** 2026-05-29 **Authors:** Joshua M. Shay, Core R&D Engine **Domains:** `sensorium/audio/`, `language_packs/`, (future) `generate/` **Depends on:** ADR-0013 (Sensorium Protocol), ADR-0181 (Audio Compiler), ADR-0180 (Delta-CRDT substrate) **Related:** [`docs/audio_pipeline_overview.md`](../audio_pipeline_overview.md) §9 (teacher boundary), [`docs/plans/audio-compiler-eval-plan.md`](../plans/audio-compiler-eval-plan.md) §4 (teacher policy) --- ## 1. Why this ADR exists (context) The audio compiler (ADR-0181) decodes the **paralinguistic** layer of speech lawfully and deterministically: energy, voicing, pitch contour (prosody), pauses, turn boundaries, emphasis, non-speech events. It is **deaf to lexical content** — it hears *how* something is said, never *what words* were said. ADR-0181 admits learned ASR (Whisper/NeMo) as **teacher/shadow lanes only** — typed transcript *labels*, never substrate, never folded into the versor. The serving path is and must remain Whisper-free ([overview §9](../audio_pipeline_overview.md)): **the teacher teaches; the lawful path serves.** That doctrine only holds in production **if a lawful runtime path exists to carry the words** the teacher bootstrapped. This ADR is the placeholder for designing that path. It is a **stub**: it records the fork and the constraints so whoever reaches the words problem does not silently reach for Whisper in the serving path. It is **not** a committed design yet. > **This is the PR to scrutinise hard** (per the overview's warning): the moment > a real consumer turns audio into words at serving time, the 0-parameter, > decode-not-borrow doctrine is on the line. ## 2. Problem statement Define a **deterministic, 0-parameter, replayable** path from a canonical audio signal to **lexical content** (words / lexemes) that: - never calls a learned model in the serving path; - preserves the ADR-0181 invariants (versor condition < 1e-6; merge-key determinism; no PCM in traces; no normalization outside allowed sites); - recovers what it can from physical facts in the wave (decode, not borrow), and refuses honestly where it cannot (no fabricated words — the `wrong = 0` discipline generalises here); - can be *taught* (vocabulary grown through the reviewed corridor) without the teacher becoming a runtime dependency. ## 3. Candidate directions (to be evaluated, not yet decided) Two non-exclusive paths, named in the overview: - **(A) Words-as-text.** Audio stays a paralinguistic-plus-coarse-phonetic sense; the *what* arrives through the existing **text modality**. No serving-time ASR at all. Cleanest and lowest-risk; may be sufficient for many use cases. - **(B) Deterministic audio→lexeme decode.** Extend the acoustic front-end toward **lawful phonetics** — formant tracking, spectral-band energies — to recover vowel quality and broad consonant classes, then match against **taught vocabulary** (acoustic-pattern ↔ lexeme associations grown via the reviewed teaching corridor). 0-parameter, fully replayable; real-speech ceiling is lower than learned ASR, and that cost must be stated honestly. A teacher (Whisper, reviewed) may **bootstrap** the taught vocabulary for (B), then be removed — it is scaffolding, not a component ([overview §9](../audio_pipeline_overview.md)). ## 4. Constraints any accepted design must honour - **0 learned parameters in the serving path** (track in [`docs/model_dependency_size_tally.md`](../model_dependency_size_tally.md)). - **Decode, not borrow** — features must be physically present in the wave; no opaque latents (ADR-0181 §5 rejects embeddings as substrate). - **Refuse over fabricate** — where phonetic evidence is insufficient, emit no lexeme rather than a guess; reuse the `wrong = 0` / honest-refusal discipline. - **Lexeme growth is reviewed** — new acoustic↔lexeme associations enter only through the contemplation → proposal → HITL corridor (cf. ADR-0164/0165's treatment of lexicon/primitive growth), never as raw model output. - **Determinism / replay** — same canonical bytes ⇒ same lexemes ⇒ same trace hash; quantize before semantics (ADR-0181 spec §7). ## 5. Open questions (for the full ADR) - Is (A) alone sufficient, deferring (B) indefinitely? What use cases actually require serving-time audio→words? - What is the minimal lawful phonetic feature set (formants? MFCC-like bands? — noting MFCC must stay deterministic and inspectable, not a learned frontend)? - How are acoustic↔lexeme associations represented in a pack, and how are they taught/reviewed/versioned/checksummed? - What is the honest accuracy ceiling of (B), and how is it measured (a sealed audio eval lane analogous to the GSM8K sealed test)? - Speaker/accent/noise robustness without learned models — scope or explicitly out-of-scope for v1? - Does (B) compose with the binding-graph / comprehension reader the same way the text path does, so downstream is unchanged? ## 6. Decision **Deferred.** This stub records the fork and the constraints. No path is selected yet. The serving path remains Whisper-free and audio remains paralinguistic until a full ADR selects and specifies (A) and/or (B). ## 7. Consequences - Until this is taken up, audio comprehension is **prosody/turn/affect only** at serving time; lexical content for audio is unavailable in production (text modality carries words). - Recording the fork now prevents the silent failure mode: someone wiring a teacher into the serving path because "audio needs words" without confronting the doctrinal cost. That decision must go through *this* ADR's successor. ## 8. References - ADR-0181 — Audio compiler; teacher/shadow policy; embeddings rejected as substrate. - ADR-0180 — Delta-CRDT substrate; trace/merge determinism the lexeme path must preserve. - ADR-0164 / ADR-0165 — reviewed growth of lexicon entries and lexeme primitives (the corridor a taught audio vocabulary would reuse). - [`docs/audio_pipeline_overview.md`](../audio_pipeline_overview.md) §9 — teacher = scaffolding; serving path stays Whisper-free; paths (A)/(B). - [`docs/model_dependency_size_tally.md`](../model_dependency_size_tally.md) — the 0-parameter tally this path must not move.