Featural Acoustic Coding
Featural Acoustic Coding reframes speech recognition around acoustic and articulatory feature bundles rather than atomic phoneme labels. For N'Ko, the key observation is that tone, duration, vowel color, and onset properties should remain evidence-bearing features instead of being discarded before transcription.
Paper workspace
Live draft structure
Artifacts
Draft PDF
Rendered FAC draft. It should remain live until feature-head experiments are reviewed.
Open artifactEditable source
Draft PDF exists, but FAC is still theory plus harness. Read-speech evaluation is the next release gate.
Source anchors
nko-acoustic-coding/main.tex
nko-acoustic-coding/DOCUMENTATION.md
nko-acoustic-coding/experiments/READ_SPEECH_RUNBOOK.md
nko-acoustic-coding/experiments/tone_fusion_eval.py
Method tags
Ingest intersections
Status
Drafted with runnable experiment harness; first read-speech evaluation pending.
Key claims
01
Phonemes are feature bundles, not indivisible classes.
02
Tone restoration is partly acoustic and cannot be solved honestly by text priors alone.
03
N'Ko is a plausible symbolic substrate for feature-grounded speech.
Public reading note
Working paper; read-speech evaluation is the next release gate.
Standard skeleton
What this paper must keep proving
problem
Phoneme labels collapse acoustic features that may matter most for low-resource tonal speech.
method
Represent speech through feature bundles before composing phonemes and rendering symbols.
implementation
Feature-head scaffolds, acoustic verifier, read-speech packet design, N'Ko feature mapping.
data
Read-speech prompts, reviewed audio, tone and feature annotations. No unreviewed output becomes truth.
evaluation
Feature prediction, tone evidence, acoustic-grounded correction ranking, and transcript faithfulness.
references
Neural speech codecs, articulatory phonology, tone modeling, acoustic representation learning.
openQuestions
Whether codec-token acoustic world models can supply the representation layer FAC needs.
Checkpoints and references
Proof chain
FAC draft rendered
nko-acoustic-coding draft PDF
The theory and design are captured in a current render.
Read-speech evaluation
FAC read-speech harness
This must be completed before FAC becomes an empirical claim.
Acoustic verifier signal
acoustic verifier AUC result and packet review path
Supports evidence-governance direction, not full feature-head success.
Reference links
Codec-token speech modelsextendsrelated-work slot
N'Ko substrate papersupports