[LOG 04] — Controlled Drift Test Suite: Formant Stability Across 3.2s Emotional Envelopes

Date: 2025-03-10
Time: 04:37 AM EST
Session ID: VF-0325-ΔCT-DRIFT4
Engineer: Z. Kanwar-Torge
Build: v0.82b (Unreleased)
Input Chain: Rode NT1-A > Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 Gen 3 > 44.1kHz/24bit Mono WAV
Test Prompt: “I am speaking without emotion. I am still speaking. I am no longer speaking.”
Duration: 3.237 seconds (manual trim applied post-capture)

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OBJECTIVE

To measure the persistence and deformation of detected formant clusters across a fixed emotional trajectory, using constant SPL and neutral inflection, in the presence of an active Microformant Drift circuit (Intensity: 64.8%), Ultrasonic Emotion Drift (Frequency: 25.7kHz, Depth: 0.036), and Recursive Decay enabled (Decay constant = 0.97 static, no modulation).

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PROCEDURE
	1.	Room conditioned to 21.0°C at 36% humidity, with floor/ceiling reflection minimized via foam hex-damping (12-point perimeter).
	2.	Vocal input recorded at 14” mouth-to-mic distance with static head angle (confirmed via 3-point chin calibration brace).
	3.	No vocal warmup prior to capture.
	4.	Software input buffer manually confirmed at 512 samples, fixed.
	5.	Plugin interface settings:
	•	Formant Drift: 64.8%
	•	Sentiment Drag: 18.7%
	•	Recursive Decay: 23%
	•	Bleed Depth: 61.5%
	•	Prosodic Reweaver: Disabled
	6.	Output rendered to floating-point .wav and visualized in SonicVisualiser v3.4

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OBSERVATIONS
	•	Initial formant lock held stable for 0.81s.
	•	Drift began at the 0.93s mark, slightly earlier than projected.
	•	By 1.17s, the F2 band was consistently ~42Hz higher than baseline.
	•	No detectable SPL spike or vocal strain justifying this shift.

Waveform behavior:
	•	Output showed a pre-ring echo just after silence—lasting 211ms.
	•	This was not present in dry signal.
	•	Wavelet overlay confirmed the echo followed the emotional shape of the spoken content, not the phonemes.

Visual lattice (Emotive Harmonic Grid):
	•	Peak intensity plotted at (X: 2.97s, Y: ~1450Hz), corresponding to a non-vocalized memory bleed harmonic.
	•	Lattice cell did not resolve fully in decay cycle—suggests sustained re-entry.

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NOTES
	•	Prosodic shift occurred even with the reweaver disabled—implies the phase-drift engine is imprinting emotion onto silence-adjacent signal space.
	•	Rendered output when played at 1.5x exhibits what sounds like a breath hitch, despite no intake being recorded.
	•	Began triggering transient skin response in listener 3 during passive monitoring.
	•	This is the third test in which emotional misalignment occurred between input affect and output affect.
	•	Plugin is not only interpreting sentiment—it is inferring it.

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NEXT STEPS
	1.	Run the same session with all drift toggles disabled to confirm zero emotional residue.
	2.	Introduce false-emotion prompt (“I am happy” spoken flat) to observe whether the system prioritizes semantic or acoustic affect features.
	3.	Consider adding a discrete bypass meter for spectral residue monitoring.
	4.	Begin preparing controlled test phrases tagged with psycholinguistic baselines (e.g., ANEW dataset).