Freeze unseen music stress corpus and independently verified gated DTW experiment

tools/speech-vad/README.md

@@ -36,3 +36,36 @@ VAD report. It preserves all five competitors, no-speech status, original source
 intervals and raw ASR logs. `compare.py BASELINE GATED` reports component timing
 and segment counts only; it rejects incomplete or invalid pools and does not
 score retrieval quality. See the protocol document for actual evidence.
+# Separate frozen VAD + DTW comparison
+
+`gated-dtw-policy.json` combines the already frozen Silero source-intersection
+decisions with the separately declared base DTW sentence-point contract.
+Add `--dtw-sentences` to `gated_asr.py` and select a new output, for example
+`.searchi/speech/gated-base-dtw-results-v1.json`. All five source rows remain
+mandatory; explicit no-speech rows use unchanged actual frozen VAD evidence and
+launch no ASR. Neither relevance labels nor the observed malformed piano output
+selects a gate or a window. Original raw Google audio retrieval stays unchanged.
+Original raw recognized segments and ordinary token errors remain recorded.
+Valid DTW points alone determine the separate aligned candidate times; missing
+or invalid points make accepted comparison scoring ineligible.
+
+The combined manifest pins unchanged VAD report/worker, base worker, DTW policy,
+DTW helper and ordinary helper hashes. It preserves the old gated policy in
+`policy`, with separate `alignment_policy` and `combination_policy` provenance.
+Rankers must independently validate both policies and reconstruct every frozen
+VAD window and DTW point before inference/scoring. Existing gated base output
+is not overwritten. A combination plan or structural tests establish no new
+speech recognition or timestamp quality.
+
+Run only after the coordinator freezes the plan and grants the exclusive CPU
+slot. Use `--no-gpu --threads 1 --processors 1 --dtw base --no-flash-attn`; the
+harness adds these explicitly. The twelve existing speech windows remain
+bounded to 30 seconds, 4 MiB raw output and 600 seconds each. Observed gated
+base processing previously took about 65 seconds including VAD cost; DTW cost
+and memory have not been measured. Native DTW workspace defaults to an additional
+128 MiB, which is not a total memory ceiling. Strict parse failures retain bounded
+raw bytes and atomically persist incomplete status, then stop instead of skipping
+a competitor. No full rerun has established this combined policy.
+DTW native logs are retained byte-exact as bounded base64 plus SHA so malformed
+recognized bytes in diagnostic stderr cannot cause lossy decoding. Recognized
+JSON remains strict UTF-8 and cannot be repaired by this log representation.