VOLE-Audio: Procedural Sampling and Direct Audio Materialization from Deterministic State - Broad Prior-Art Technical Disclosure and Research Architecture

Digital audio systems commonly make sampled waveforms the dominant representation across multiple layers: files are decoded into PCM or related sample-domain codes, samplers cache sample blocks, processing graphs consume and emit sample-domain buffers, mixers produce endpoint blocks, audio servers exchange buffers, and device interfaces ultimately deliver sample codes to digital-to-analog converters. This organization is effective, general, and deeply optimized, but it conflates two distinct roles: audio state and an observation of audio state at discrete sample coordinates. This disclosure presents VOLE-Audio, a procedural sampler and audio observation architecture in which persistent deterministic state is authoritative and PCM is demoted to a transient observation view. A VOLE-Audio object may be authored procedurally or compiled from sampled audio by inverse proceduralization: bounded search for deterministic explanations such as repetition, periodicity, wavetables, oscillator or partial models, predictors, reusable motifs, transforms, or other deterministic families, combined with explicit residual information sufficient to close the reconstruction error. An exact profile requires that the materializer reproduce the declared sample-domain observation exactly. A literal sampled representation remains a mandatory fallback; the architecture therefore does not assume that arbitrary natural, noisy, encrypted, or high-entropy audio admits a compact procedural explanation. The sampler operates on object identity, instances, event timelines, clocks, phase state, transformations, residuals, and observation requests rather than requiring a fully materialized waveform. Playback of a sample object at time t is consequently defined as evaluation of a deterministic observation function, not necessarily indexing a resident PCM array. Operations such as triggering, looping, reversing, rate conversion, gain, envelopes, filtering, routing, mixing, and spatial observation may be expressed as state transitions or transformations over this representation and may be fused into observation-time evaluation. The first implementation target disclosed here is GPU-resident execution using CUDA and ROCm/HIP-class systems. The accelerator retains active sampler state and evaluates only the endpoint observations needed for upcoming deadlines. A native direct path is distinguished from a diagnostic buffered path: rendering a PCM block into device memory and copying it into a conventional host PCM buffer does not satisfy the direct-materialization objective. The experimental target is to write final sample codes from the GPU into endpoint-visible memory, or to use peer-device mechanisms where the platform and device topology permit, thereby eliminating application-level and host-staged PCM as intermediate media representations. Commodity audio hardware still requires bounded physical elasticity: DMA regions, FIFOs, registers, or equivalent state, to cross asynchronous scheduling and clock domains. VOLE-Audio therefore does not claim that physical sample storage can be literally zero; it defines and measures the minimum transient observation state required by the endpoint. The disclosure is deliberately broader than any single codec, synthesis method, operating system API, GPU vendor, sample format, or audio device. It includes exact and explicitly lossy profiles; authored and sampled-origin content; monophonic, multichannel, object, scene, and spatial audio; local and network transport; partial and random-access observation; CPU reference semantics; CUDA and ROCm acceleration; optional future compute backends; and a future, explicitly non-implemented endpoint evaluator in FPGA/DSP/ASIC-class hardware. The normative decoder/evaluator need not depend on machine learning, EntropyFS, DSFB, a network, or external codecs. Search or authoring tools may propose representations by any method, but accepted representations are governed by declared deterministic semantics and evidence. The paper places the work against substantial prior art. MUSIC-N/Csound-class systems established programmable sound synthesis; MPEG-4 Structured Audio established transmitted synthesis programs, scores, sample banks, scheduling, synthetic/natural hybrid audio, and even generalized audio coding; procedural-audio research established “sound as process”; predictive lossless codecs established model-plus-residual reconstruction; object-audio systems established scene- and listener-dependent rendering; and decades of research have demonstrated GPU-accelerated audio synthesis and signal processing. VOLE-Audio does not claim those ideas individually. Its disclosed research architecture is the systematic representation-boundary inversion that treats sample-domain audio as an observation API over persistent deterministic state, couples sampled-origin inverse proceduralization to explicit residual closure and literal fallback, preserves that state through sampler operations and transport, and drives the observation boundary toward the physical audio endpoint through GPU-resident direct materialization. A rigorous empirical program is specified. It measures representation bytes, residual bytes, host PCM residency, PCM copy traffic, device-to-host sample traffic, endpoint observation depth, PCIe or fabric traffic, work, latency distributions, deadline margin, underruns, random-access cost, polyphony, energy, and reconstruction hashes. Every performance statement is conditioned on hardware, topology, driver, workload, and measurement method. Unsupported direct-memory paths must be recorded as unsupported or inconclusive rather than silently replaced by buffered paths. Negative controls, including noise and adversarial signals, are required. The objective is not to prove that procedural representation always wins; it is to determine, with falsifiable evidence, where retaining audio as deterministic state until observation changes the storage, memory-traffic, transport, latency, and execution trade space. Keywords procedural audio; sampler; deterministic state; PCM observation; sample materialization; inverse proceduralization; residual coding; structured audio; GPU audio; CUDA; ROCm; HIP; direct audio; zero intermediate PCM; endpoint materialization; deterministic DSP; content-addressed audio; audio transport; audio architecture; computational media.