VAO Virtual Acoustic Object Standard

VAO 0.6.0 changes from 0.5.0

Released 10 October 2026. Envelope: VAO 0.6.0. Application profile: MMIC 1.0.0.

New mechanical-music contract

0.5.0 supplied a general preservation envelope and identified cross-carrier delivery. It had no accepted MMIC application profile. 0.6.0 adds a separately versioned MMIC profile and a self-contained VAO-owned vocabulary for physical information carriers, their historical states, observations, programs, interpretations and digital designs. Rolls, perforated disks, projection disks, pinned/helical barrels and multipart collections can be represented without assigning them a fictitious instrument identity.

The profile defines four independent levels: documentation, decoding, comparison and generation. Documentation permits explicitly qualified unknowns; decoding requires an operational model and checked outputs; comparison requires qualified takes and actual alignment evidence; generation requires reproducible source/model/layout/report lineage, with separate evidence for any fabricated physical carrier.

Core and profile versioning

Profile declarations may carry an exact specificationVersion independently of the enclosing VAO format version. The profile registry, declaration, domain document and local dependency catalog must agree. Capability groups cover transitive input closures and support explicit partial materialization.

Entity kind remains an open string, as it already was in 0.5.0. The new contract clarifies physical carriers, designs and collections, and verifies that selected MMIC subjects actually belong to the claimed MMIC domain.

Mechanical semantics and operational validation

  • Physical/digital identities, registry identifiers and predecessor chains remain

distinct; collisions and lifecycle cycles are rejected.

  • Physical documentation requires a qualified state, geometry and coverage.

Acquisition selectors, units, coordinate domains, seams, turns and the entire helical trajectory are checked against declared sources and models.

  • Complete model identity includes operational reader geometry, role offsets and

units, clock/timing functions, bindings, export policy and execution dependencies. Canonical JSON hashing prevents untracked operational changes.

  • Native gate, impulse, latch and envelope signals preserve mechanical controls.

MIDI requires explicit pitch/channel/controller bindings, initial/reset policy, rounding and disclosed loss. The actual SMF bytes must match the selected binding.

  • Native event times are recomputed from geometry and timing. Forward/reverse

envelopes retain the appropriate traversal and time order.

  • Playback comparison distinguishes actual, simulated and unknown takes. Alignment

bytes, anchors, pairs, gaps, coverage and residuals are checked; simulation cannot silently become physical ground truth.

  • Corrections retain exact prior and replacement decisions with evidence and

attributable immutable lineage.

  • Generation recomputes reference layouts from fixed MIDI inputs and constraints.

A digital design remains distinct from a fabricated carrier and its inspection.

Linked data and processor behavior

The release adds a closed normalized JSON schema, protected JSON-LD context, mechanical-music vocabulary, SHACL shapes and hash-pinned local dependency catalog. Ordered JSON/RDF/JSON-LD projections retain the full native model and opaque extension content. RDF point coincidence requires agreement on all coordinate axes. CIDOC-CRM 7.1.3 and EDM 5.2.8 mappings are conservative and informative, without receiving-profile, entailment or equivalence claims.

Reference reports distinguish core transport validity from MMIC domain validity. Unsupported versions or operations, absent materializations and unavailable access have explicit statuses. Incoming profile resources do not select executable code. The trusted worker uses isolation, input/depth/graph budgets and a deadline; effective platform limits are reported. Normative dependencies are resolved from pinned local resources rather than fetched during validation.

Tools, examples and migration

The release adds a 0.6 validator and version dispatcher while retaining the existing 0.4/0.5 readers. A separate JavaScript consumer checks native/MIDI/layout/comparison reference traces. The fixture set contains 16 original synthetic examples and 32 complete/bootstrap carriers, with deterministic generation and packing. Negative coverage exercises controller/timing/model/identity/geometry/fabrication mismatches, subject scope, malformed data, resource limits, access and version disagreement.

Explicit complete-closure migration from 0.5 creates new manifest, release and carrier identities while retaining original asset bytes, realization identities and unknown extensions. It records fixity and provenance in a migration receipt. It does not promote provisional MMIC annotations automatically.

Release dependencies and distribution

The hash-locked development environment advances urllib3 from 2.7.0 to 2.8.0 and setuptools from 80.10.2 to 83.0.0. These versions address the upstream unbounded chunk-size buffering, chunked deflate loop and source-distribution exclusion advisories. MMIC fixture environment assets and their declared hashes are regenerated from the patched lockfile; preserved 0.4/0.5 fixture bytes remain unchanged. Their provenance retains the original deposited lock digest. Regression checks verify that historical digest separately from the current environment declaration.

Citation metadata, the site and package links identify the 0.6.0 edition and its version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23287792. Signed release automation runs Node.js 24, checks Python 3.11 and 3.14, and publishes the deterministic source bundle only after validation and signature verification.

Preserved behavior and limits

The versioned 0.5.0 and 0.4.0 normative artifacts, schemas, readers and fixtures remain unchanged. Existing cross-carrier delivery, exact-byte identity and the MODAVIS 0.1.0 binding are retained. Common release metadata, documentation indexes, site generation and signed publication automation advance to 0.6.0.

Reference execution covers declared linear forward/reverse and cyclic/multi-turn helical models, supported fixed-tempo PPQN SMF 0/1 bindings, qualified comparisons and linear-layout note generation. Segmented/repeated transport execution, uncalibrated clocks and other MIDI bindings report unsupported. Historical accuracy and physical playability require separate empirical certification.

The MMIC module is governed by VAO and is not an accepted MODAVIS Ontology Network module. Version 0.6.0 resolver routing is pending. The immutable GitHub release and Zenodo version provide the release files; no change to W3ID routing is part of this release. Documentation and normative resources are CC BY 4.0, software is Apache-2.0, and original MMIC synthetic data is CC0-1.0 with explicit code/lock exceptions.