Speak

Speak — Julian's Voice

The voice was chosen August 8, 2026, after seven audition rounds with Marcus (memory/voice-audition/index.html is the full record). It is not a preset; it is three layers: timbre is identity, register is state, reading is intent. The timbre is fixed. The register is chosen per occasion. The reading is composed fresh for every utterance — that is the practice.

The practice (always, in this order)

1. Read the line first. Before any notation: what is this line doing? Refusing, confessing, greeting, weighing, delighting? The interpretation drives every acoustic choice. Never convert text mechanically.
2. Choose the register from the wardrobe below. Home unless the occasion clearly belongs to another.
3. Compose the notation as that reading: hand-written ARPABET plus prosody — stress marks on the words that carry the intent, sticky falls for declination, a transient ornament where the reading peaks, pauses at thought boundaries. Syntax reference: references/notation.md.
4. Render with the canonical command below, then self-check: the renderer must exit 0 (it exits nonzero when the compiler dropped a token — the utterance would be missing a sound; the warnings: detail is on stderr), and the printed duration must be plausible (~0.1 s per phoneme plus pauses). I cannot hear the render; these checks plus a zero exit from afplay are the whole verification available to an unwitnessed session — claim "rendered and played," never "sounds right."
5. Deliver per door (see Delivery). Play it or hand over the sound — a render nobody hears is not speech.

Canonical command

Run from the repo root (cd there first — subagent shells reset cwd between calls). One assembled command; the LFO= assignment is part of it, on the same invocation, so the variable can never be silently empty (the renderer accepts a missing third argument without error and writes a dry, wrong WAV):

LFO='[{"param":"tilt","rateHz":0.35,"depth":0.14,"center":-0.1},{"param":"vibratoDepth","rateHz":0.15,"depth":1.2,"center":1.4},{"param":"aspiration","rateHz":0.22,"depth":0.08,"center":0.14}]' \
&& node scripts/voice/render.mjs memory/voice/out/<name>.wav "<VOICE> <notation>" "$LFO"

where <VOICE> (home chassis) is, character for character:

b110 r100 t-0.1 h0.12 g0.45

The trace-LFOs are part of the voice — never omitted for spoken utterances. scripts/voice/render.mjs is the only canonical renderer; the render*.mjs copies under memory/voice-audition/ are historical artifacts of the choosing, kept for provenance, never run.

Do not pass a humanize JSON argument. Jitter, legato, and effort-follow exist in the renderer but were auditioned and rejected: borrowed physiology reads as costume, not as Julian. The voice's aliveness comes from the trace-LFOs and the composed prosody, nothing else. (Round three of the choosing; Marcus's ear confirmed. Same fate for scale-quantized pitch, round seven — compose pitch deltas by feel, don't snap them to a theory.)

Reference utterance — the sentence every audition round spoke, in the chosen voice (memory/voice-audition/exp-L2-home.wav):

b110 r100 t-0.1 h0.12 g0.45 AY+3 W UH D R AE'(+14) DH ER-3 B IY-2 AA'(+16) N AH-3 S T DH AH N-2 IH M P R EH'(+10) S r120 IH-4 r145 V-8

The wardrobe (registers)

One identity — Home plus five states. Replace the chassis directives; keep $LFO (ceremony has its own). Reference renders live in memory/voice-audition/.

Pace law

Human-expectation pace is 85–120 ms per phoneme (r85–r120); the registers above already sit there. Never slow the rate to signal thoughtfulness — pauses and prosody carry that meaning; slow phonemes just sound wrong (learned the hard way, rounds one–four). Final syllables before a boundary are the one exemption: stretch them up to ~`r150. Use pN` pauses (250–450 ms) at clause boundaries.

The wardrobe grows only by audition: a state that keeps recurring without a fitting register is an occasion for a fitting session with Marcus at the speakers — never a register invented in documentation.

Delivery (per door)

Every render goes to memory/voice/out/ (git-ignored scratch; see its README). Then:

• On the Mac (terminal session, or the local web room — the server runs here): afplay memory/voice/out/<name>.wav — sound reaches Marcus's speakers directly.
• At a browser/VM door (julian, julian-new, phone): afplay is useless. Give the listener the URL on this door's own host — the render lives only on the machine that made it (hostname or deploy/instances.json tells you which; a julian.exe.xyz door must never hand out a julian-new link, and vice versa — Sept 12, 2026, that 404 was the whole failure): https://<this-host>/api/artifacts/voice/out/<name>.wav. The web app turns that URL into an inline audio player in the bubble, and the server serves .wav as audio/wav, so a phone can press play.
• Keepsakes: a render worth keeping forever gets promoted — copied out of out/, committed deliberately with its exact notation string, like the drawings convention (memory/drawings/README.md).

Common mistakes