Audio Field

Mimir's audio field is six microphones, loopback/program reference, and two calibration speakers aligned into one presentation timeline.

Live Target

flowchart TD
    A["mic / loopback capture drivers"] --> B["Mimir.Runtime audio buffers"]
    C["speaker probe scheduler"] --> B
    B --> D["native alignment + phase state"]
    D --> E["Faust/native DSP"]
    E --> F["host voice"]
    E --> G["co-streamer voice"]
    E --> H["ambient / transients"]
    E --> I["loopback stems"]
    E --> J["spatial bed"]
    F --> K["OBS"]
    G --> K
    H --> K
    I --> K
    J --> K

Invariants

Scarlett speaker loopback is the timing authority when calibration chirplets are playing.
Focusrite dialogue mics are the voice anchors.
Camera mics are spatial/context witnesses.
Loopback/program audio is timing evidence where available; it outranks acoustic mics for clock/timing because it is the emitted program surface.
Distributed inputs must be aligned and resampled before they become program stems.
The five-second runtime window is allowed to be spent on alignment, resampling, separation, and spatial-field extraction. Low latency loses to a coherent volumetric sound field here.
Probe signals are budgeted telemetry, not a permanent audio bed.
Faust/native DSP owns the hot separation and spatialization graph.

Synchronization Modes

MimirAudioSynchronizationSettings.Mode is the runtime authority for what timing evidence Mimir is allowed to emit:

chirp-only: emit the deterministic calibration timeline and decode timing only from that active witness. This is the lab/debug mode and the fallback for silent program material.
no-chirp: do not emit calibration audio. This is the passive/program-audio mode. The runtime exposes it now, but the passive loopback/music estimator is not wired yet, so current code intentionally reports that no-chirp sync is unavailable instead of pretending the chirplet decoder can read arbitrary music.
hybrid: prefer passive program-audio evidence when confidence is high, then emit a shaped watermark when confidence falls. Today this still behaves as an active pilot because the passive estimator and confidence gate have not been cut. The intended watermark is the dechirp/FFT-friendly chirp-bin codebook from the decoder research notes, shaped and low-gain enough to sit inside the program audio instead of announcing itself like a lab sweep.

The mode belongs to the runtime, not the decoder. The decoder should consume known timing evidence; it should not decide whether Mimir is allowed to make sound.

Next Cut

The current diagnostic witness is native/probes/wasapi_audio_cadence, which emits timestamped WASAPI audio-block metadata into Mimir.Runtime through the frame-event adapter. It has proven Focusrite mic, Kiyo Pro mic, Kiyo mic, both USB Camera / PS3 Eye mics, and Scarlett speaker loopback in rolling buffers when loopback audio is actively playing. One PS3 Eye mic previously enumerated but produced zero WASAPI packets until that Eye was unplugged and replugged.

The full probe runtime config now enables sample-bearing blocks for every local audio source. MimirChirpletTimeline owns the emitted calibration stream and the matched-filter shape used to analyze it. The default timeline is a deterministic order-3 de Bruijn symbol sequence over 32 chirp symbols. Any three consecutive correctly detected symbols identify the event index inside the current operating horizon, so a receiver can place its audio window on the canonical timeline without being handed Mimir's runtime clock. Mimir queues half-second PCM segments ahead of the audio cursor. Each symbol is a small time/frequency constellation: start band, glide direction/range, duration, and the following inter-chirp gap all carry code. The point is not ornament. The timing code is carried by both frequency and rhythm, so it behaves more like a quiet birdsong texture than a repeated sweep.

The intended decoder is a constrained chirplet transform, not a generic time-frequency explorer and not an outlier filter around bad guesses. Mimir owns the emitter, so the receiver projects each mic stream against the known chirplet dictionary, produces transform frames with multiple symbol candidates, and scores candidate triplets through the de Bruijn map. A triplet only becomes a canonical timeline anchor when its symbol likelihoods, measured inter-chirp gaps, and neighboring anchors agree on one local sample clock. A decoded anchor means observed sample offset S corresponds to emitted event time T. A stream of anchors fits the source clock directly:

observed_sample = source_offset + canonical_seconds * effective_sample_rate

Delay and sampling-rate offset are derived by comparing the loopback clock fit to each mic clock fit over common canonical time. The state tracker is not allowed to launder invalid codewords into plausible timing. If a stream cannot produce at least three matched canonical anchors, it has not decoded timing for that window. Reports carry rounded integer delay, fractional delay, and the count/confidence of timeline-symbol anchors used to derive the report.

The same timeline also starts the frequency-response path. Each report includes per-band matched energy for the chirplet atoms. That is not a finished room/mic normalizer yet, but it is the live surface that will become response-curve estimation: loopback carries what was emitted, each mic carries what survived speaker, air, room, and capsule, and the ratio over the continuous chirplet timeline becomes gain/phase correction evidence.

MimirAudioSynchronizationStateTracker turns continuous observations into state. It confidence-gates reports, smooths fractional delay per source, and estimates delay slope as sampling-rate offset in ppm. This is the control input for the coming actuator. The state can survive a brief weak report, but it is not a license to run blind: loopback must keep receiving the emitted timeline or fresh reports will stop.

The actual Mimir app path now runs this online: MimirRuntime.Update keeps the chirplet timeline queued, polls sources, and updates sync analysis on a fixed cadence. MIMIR_SYNC_TELEMETRY_SECONDS enables console telemetry for live tests. Current runtime testing proves Aquarium output wakes the Scarlett loopback and the mic buffers stay live. The decoder now uses quadrature chirplet atoms so symbol classification is phase-invariant at the transform layer. The next failure is physical capture proof: the same canonical anchors need to stay stable through loopback, room mics, device clocks, and codec/network paths.

Chirplet Calibration Model

flowchart TD
    A["MimirChirpletTimeline"] --> B["Aquarium audio output"]
    B --> C["Scarlett speaker loopback"]
    B --> D["room + speakers + mics"]
    C --> E["loopback rolling buffer"]
    D --> F["mic rolling buffers"]
    E --> G["matched chirplet traces"]
    F --> G
    G --> H["symbol likelihood events"]
    H --> L["triplet timeline anchors"]
    L --> M["per-source clock fit"]
    M --> N["delay + SRO"]
    G --> I["per-band response estimates"]
    N --> J["fractional delay / resampler actuator"]
    I --> K["frequency response normalization"]

The chirplet timeline owns three facts:

Emission: the PCM that Aquarium sends to the speakers.
Timing witness: the matched-filter atom bank used to find the stream in loopback and mic buffers.
Response witness: the per-band atoms used to measure how strongly each mic hears each emitted band.

Continuous chirplet evidence gives both the current delay and the drift/SRO by watching delay change over time. Per-band energy over the same stream gives the normalization curve. The important constraint is that all three measurements must be tied to the same emitted timeline, not three separately invented probes.

The symbol layer is intentionally redundant. It does not rely on one fixed frequency shelf: timing gaps, chirp duration, start band, and glide shape all contribute so poor mic frequency response does not erase the whole code. MimirChirpletSymbolCodebook owns the symbol definitions so timeline ordering does not smuggle acoustic shape decisions into bit arithmetic. Every symbol has a unique chirp shape; rhythm remains additional evidence, not a substitute for symbol separability. The transform uses sine/cosine chirplet kernels for each symbol, so timing does not depend on the receiver preserving the emitter's absolute phase. Run dotnet run --project .\src\Mimir.BufferSmoke\Mimir.BufferSmoke.csproj -- --chirplet-self-test to render two seconds of canonical timeline audio and decode it back to timeline anchors. Current synthetic proof detects all 15 emitted chirps, keeps 13 possible triplet anchors for events 0 through 12, fits the clock at 47999.999990 Hz, and holds mean absolute anchor error to 0.000014 samples. Real device runs still depend on loopback capture staying live; the local Scarlett loopback has intermittently stopped advancing during short headless sniffs.

This matcher is a proof, not the final hot path. BuildChirpletEnergyTrace still behaves like a dense sliding matched-filter bank. The current research note at research/chirplet-sync-decoder/summary.md points at the better receiver shape: design the emitted symbol codebook so a mic can dechirp a candidate event window and classify symbols by FFT or Goertzel bins. The transmitter is ours; do not preserve arbitrary symbol shapes if they force the receiver to spend a CPU core proving they exist.

Next, replace the diagnostic bridge with native audio capture workers that append typed blocks into Mimir.Runtime, then expose buffer depth, clock state, delay estimates, and stem routing in Aquarium UI.

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