VOICE_V9 audible-punctuation acceptance

Status: Accepted for VOICE_V9.

VOICE_V9 makes the five marks a writer reaches for — question, exclamation, period, dash, and ellipsis — each render as a distinct, recognisable prosodic gesture rather than colliding or being dropped. It keeps the four PCA semantic axes as the learnable core and reuses every VOICE_V2–VOICE_V8 performance channel; it only reshapes the per-mark boundary signature.

Scope

• dootdoot --version reports dootdoot VOICE_V9.
• The embedded semantic mapping in assets/dootdoot_asset_v1.doot is unchanged; the PCA mapping is unchanged.
• R2 — normalisation. A run of two or more ASCII periods (..., ....) collapses to a single trailing-off ellipsis hesitation marker instead of a stutter of falling-glide periods, and a stacked terminal run (?!, !!!) collapses to its first contour. The engine already first-wins on consecutive punctuation, so the only sample-affecting case is ... becoming an ellipsis.
• R4 — closure vs continuation. Clause marks (, ; :) carry a shallow continuation rise (a new +1.5 st glide) and drop their final lowering, so a comma reads as "more coming" against a period's close.
• R1 — settle vs punch. A period falls deep to a quiet settle (−1.40 st) while an exclamation falls only shallowly (−0.60 st) from its raised, emphasized punch peak; a question keeps its suppressed rising close. The two falling marks were previously acoustically identical apart from terminal role.
• R3 — dash vs ellipsis tail shape. A hesitation marker now shapes the preceding syllable's tail: a dash clips it to silence with a steep gate (abrupt cutoff), an ellipsis decays it exponentially (trailing off). The default sustained tail is a transparent unity gain, so every non-hesitation syllable is byte-identical.
• R5 — question rise. The question gains a dedicated, wider terminal rise (4.5 st, vs the 3.0 st generic glide) with a small pre-final dip (L*) so the lift gathers then rises (H-H%) even on a short final word; declination stays suppressed across the whole final segment.
• The committed golden WAV hashes were regenerated under VOICE_V9, including new dash and ellipsis corpus fixtures (the ellipsis fixture also locks the R2 ASCII ... normalisation).

Directional Check

Derived from punctuation-prosody-audibility.md. Each mark is rendered on a minimal carrier (now. / now! / now?, and wait, go / wait - go / wait ... go) and decoded mono 44.1 kHz through the locked uv harness (scripts/acoustic_metrics.py). The point is separation: each mark occupies a distinct acoustic cell.

Measurement	now.	now!	now?	…, go	… - go	… ... go	Read
Zero-crossing rate	1770	1220	1130	1630	1400	1540	the period settle stays buzzier; the flourishes calm.
Spectral flux median	0.444	0.334	0.333	0.213	0.232	0.316	the period is the most animated terminal close.
Dominant peak range (Hz)	883	711	732	366	237	883	period / exclamation / question each sweep a different span.
Harmonicity median	0.731	0.833	0.823	0.818	0.731	0.679	the ellipsis tail is the roughest as it decays.
Active fraction	0.37	0.348	0.348	0.577	0.229	0.209	the comma is the most connected ("more coming").
Max internal gap (ms)	0	0	0	163	964	964	dash and ellipsis share the role-gated turn gap (see below).
Median active island ms	197	186	186	174	157	139	the ellipsis trails off into the shortest island.
Tremolo depth	0.174	0.165	0.162	0.196	0.204	0.277	the decayed ellipsis tail reads as the deepest trailing warble.

Two reads matter most:

• The three terminal marks separate. now. (deep settle, chatty role) is the buzziest and most animated; now! and now? calm into the flourish, and split from each other on pitch direction (fall vs rise) and dominant-peak span. The previously-identical period and exclamation are now distinct.
• Dash and ellipsis separate on tail shape, not the gap. Both inherit the same role-gated 964 ms turn gap, so the marker's own 340/500 ms rest is masked — exactly as the research note predicted. The distinguishing cues are therefore the preceding syllable's tail: the clipped dash holds harmonicity at 0.731 and a 157 ms island, while the decayed ellipsis trails to 0.679 harmonicity, a 139 ms island, and a deeper 0.277 tremolo. The tail-shape directive, not the rest length, is doing the work.

Acceptance

VOICE_V9 is accepted as the active audible-punctuation contract. The directional metrics above are a tuning aid, not the sample-level contract; the golden WAV hashes remain the byte-exact contract and were regenerated under VOICE_V9. Determinism, boundedness, and the no-runtime-randomness and no-PCA-change invariants are preserved.