sound-cue-designer

name	sound-cue-designer
description	Use when planning sound effects, audio cues, sonic logos, notification-like prompts, background music, or mix boundaries for AI paper explainer videos before TTS merge, captions, HyperFrames render, or platform review.

Sound Cue Designer

Core Rule

Use sound cues as auditory bookmarks for comprehension, not as decoration. A cue is valid only when it marks a real cognitive turn such as hook, formula reveal, Q/K/V card entry, softmax normalization, weighted V aggregation, engineering-layer shift, or next-episode CTA.

Required Checks

• Do not overpower voiceover. Keep short effects about 12-18 dB below spoken voice; keep background music about 18-24 dB below spoken voice.
• Avoid phone notification sounds, alarms, game sounds, meme stingers, harsh beeps, or dense template sound packs.
• Keep high-frequency cues away from English terms such as Attention, softmax, FlashAttention, GQA, MQA, KV Cache, and vLLM.
• Place cues between phrases or on visual action points; do not mask consonants, numbers, formulas, or subtitles.
• Treat the final mix as part of the TTS gate: if effects hurt ASR transcript diff, English clarity, or human listening review, lower or remove them.
• Do not add cue instructions into spoken_text; keep them in storyboard, FRAME, sound cue plan, or HyperFrames prompt.
• Require a final mix status when the episode contract includes SFX. A video build must not silently fall back to a no-SFX voiceover after sound cues are approved.
• Add special listening checks around professional terms, formulas, and next-episode CTA when a cue lands near those phrases.

Paper Explainer Cue Map

Moment	Cue	Purpose
Opening	restrained sonic logo	Establish series identity
Core formula	QK reveal	Mark the episode's main operation
Concept cards	Q/K/V card taps	Help memory without adding narration
Scaling	compression or squeeze cue	Indicate sqrt(d_k) stabilization
Softmax	softmax normalization rise	Convert scores into distribution
Value read	weighted V aggregation merge	Show many streams becoming one output
Engineering layer	three subdued card hits	Separate compute, architecture, runtime
CTA	gentle upward tail	Lead into the next episode

Output Contract

When used for an episode, produce or update an episode-level sound cue plan with:

• cue id and spoken cue it supports
• visual action it syncs to
• sound type, duration, and relative loudness
• risk to voice clarity, ASR transcript diff, captions, or platform tone
• verification note for human listening review
• final mix expectation: required/optional/off, target mixed file, and fallback policy

Boundaries

• Do not synthesize, download, or license sound assets.
• Do not mix final audio or replace voiceover.
• Do not change script claims, captions, formulas, or spoken text.
• Do not use sound cues to compensate for unclear narration; fix the script first.
• Do not approve a final MP4 as SFX-complete without evidence that the mixed audio file, not the dry voiceover file, was used.