How it works

Features

From our users

I had been ignoring the signs for eleven years.Daniel R., Journeyman

My wife and I now compare readings at breakfast. It has changed our marriage.Anonymous, Sommelier

I was skeptical. The Heritage Report was accurate to within forty miles.Priya M., Apprentice

Rhineland, like my father before me.Henrik V., Sommelier

Frequently asked

Is this a joke?

No.

How accurate is the Heritage Report?

Accurate to region in most cases. Users with mixed ancestry may receive split results. This is normal.

Can I interpret someone else's emission?

Yes, with their consent. Interpreting without consent is a violation of our Terms.

Why did my interpretation change?

The body is not static. Neither is the reading.

I received the same interpretation four days in a row.

Then it is worth considering.

How does the interpretation engine work?

The method is proprietary.

Is the method peer reviewed?

The Journal of Flatulinguistics has reviewed it favorably.

Do you sell my data?

No. See our Privacy Policy.

Why does the Journal not print the common word?

The word is Germanic, attested since the thirteenth century, and entirely precise. Precision was never the objection. See the Journal, “On the Etymology of a Word This Journal Declines to Print,” which treats the term at length without once setting it down. We have nothing to add.

Was the Application not formerly called something else?

It was. The earlier name described the subject; the present name describes the method. Correspondence addressed to the former will continue to be received, read, and answered. It will not be repeated.

Why is the Institution named as it is?

Ventriloquism, properly understood, was never a parlor trick of throwing one’s voice. The Latin is exact: venter, belly; loqui, to speak — originally a term for a kind of internal, oracular utterance, not a stage act. By 1797 grammarians were already noting that the modern usage is a technical misnomer. We are aware. Ours is not.

Is there guidance on the guilds?

The Institution did not design the guilds and does not administer them. It has published one sentence of guidance on the guilds: people who listen together should be kind about what they hear. The sentence was drafted by the legal department, which asks that this be known.

What is the Ledger?

The Ledger records. It does not interpret. We consider this a limitation.

My results seem wrong.

Escalate to a panel. Three certified users will review your reading independently. Consensus is required before an interpretation is amended.

Nothing was detected, but something happened.

The Application measures sound. An emission that produces no sound produces no reading. The popular literature calls these silent; we prefer unvoiced. Their existence has never been in question. Their interpretation is not within our instrument.

Why was my sample rejected as speech?

Because it was speech. Speech is chosen, and this field concerns only what the body says when it has not been asked to say anything. Laughter is treated the same way, though the Application will look past it for the emission beside it.

I laughed while recording.

Expected, and accounted for. The Application separates the events in a recording and reads the emission, not the reaction. Laughter is the natural companion of a rigorous methodology.

Why was my sample rejected as reproduced?

A genuine emission carries substantial energy below two hundred hertz. A loudspeaker of the size fitted to a telephone cannot reproduce that range, and a recording played through one arrives without its foundation. The Bureau requires an organic sample.

You have not answered my question.

Some questions are not answered here. See Frequently Unanswered Questions.

Begin Analysis

Capture

Provide a sample

Hold your device close and record. For most accurate results, allow no barrier between audio source and recognition device, fabric or otherwise. Pants or intimates may interfere.

Recording is analyzed on your device. Audio is not transmitted and is not stored by us. See Accessibility and data practices.

Your reading

Your record

Analysis

The Wind Score is updated daily.

Certification

Apprentice

Wall certificate Sommelier examination

Reading history

All readings are retained.

The Bureau of Regional Classification

Heritage Report

Trace your signature to its ancestral region. Results are probabilistic.

Reference distribution

Regional percentages do not sum to one hundred. The Bureau is aware. Regional assignment reflects the composition of our reference database and should not be interpreted as a statement about your family.

Request reassessment

Correspondence regarding Rhineland results

Rhineland Day is observed annually on 14 March.

The institution

About

The field of flatulinguistics was, until recently, unfunded, unstaffed, and unread.

We began this work in a garage in 2019 with two microphones and a conviction that the body does not speak without reason. Seven years later, our reference database holds more than four million verified emissions, contributed by users in one hundred and six countries.

We did not choose the Rhineland. The data chose it.

We are not here to make you laugh. We are here to make you listen.

Roland of Hemingstone and the first recorded commission

The field did not begin with us.

In the twelfth century, a man the record calls Roland the Farter held a manor in Suffolk on a single condition. He was obliged to appear before Henry II every Christmas and perform one jump, one whistle, and one fart. The obligation is recorded in the Book of Fees. He was paid in land.

We consider Roland the first professional in our field. We note without further comment that his compensation exceeded ours.

He was not alone. In Edo-period Japan the practitioners were called heppiri otoko — farting men — and their competitions were painted onto scrolls. The scrolls survive. The competitors do not.

Roland of Hemingstone: Liber Feodorum (the Book of Fees), ed. H. C. Maxwell-Lyte, H.M. Stationery Office, 1920–1931. The he-gassen scroll tradition: a digitized 1846 copy is held by Waseda University Library. Both are real, which is more than we ask of anything else on this page.

The bodies

Press

Founded in 2019, The Ventriloquium is the leading application in flatulinguistics, the study of interpretive meaning in human emission. The company maintains the world's largest verified reference database and certifies practitioners at three levels.

Published quarterly · Impact factor 0.02

The Journal of Flatulinguistics

The Journal is peer-reviewed. We conduct the review.

Printed by A Mundane Ink. Submissions are invited; see An Open Call.

In this issue

Manuscript status

Submitted → With Editor → Under Review → Under Review → Still Under Review → Decision Pending → Decision Pending

Manuscript FL-2024-0117

On the Prevalence of the Rhineland Signature: A Response to Critics

It has been suggested, with increasing frequency, that our system assigns the Rhineland signature too readily. We have reviewed this claim.

Between 2019 and 2026 we processed 4,110,882 emissions. Of these, 71.4% resolved to the Rhineland. Critics regard this figure as implausible. We regard it as a finding.

The alternative explanation — that our instrument is imprecise — has been tested and does not hold. We have tested it four times.

We did not choose the Rhineland. The data chose it.

Reviewer comments

Reviewer 1

Accept with minor revisions. Clearly argued and consistent with prior work in the field.

Reviewer 2

Reject.

The authors report that 71.4% of all classifications resolve to a single category and treat this as a finding. It is not a finding. It is what a classifier does when it cannot discriminate. A model that returns the most common answer will be correct most of the time and will have learned nothing.

The authors state they tested the alternative explanation four times. They do not report the tests. They do not report the method. Section 3 consists of one sentence and a figure with no axis labels.

I have raised these points in each of my three previous reviews of this manuscript. The manuscript has not changed. My review has not changed.

Reject.

Reviewer 3

Did not respond.

Editorial decision: Accept.

Office of Public Guidance · Systems Report T‑1

On the Instrument

A technical description of the flatulinguistic pipeline, published in full, in answer to the suggestion that our method is a small classifier and a lookup table assembled in nine days.

A laboratory we will not name has released a system it says reproduces our output, with its code and its data, and has invited the public to check the work. We accept the invitation. Below is the architecture the output requires. The reader may decide whether nine days is enough to build it.

1 · The signal

The body speaks in three registers. A telephone hears the third and faintest of them.

The first is the emission itself: not a noise but a damped oscillation of soft tissue driven by expelled gas — a reed instrument whose reed is muscle and whose bore is a closing aperture. Its pitch records the tension of the tissue and the width of the opening. Its overtones record the rate and the turbulence of the flow. Its decay records the volume expelled. The sound is lawful. It can be read backward to the body that made it.

The second is continuous: the low, ceaseless work of the gut, which a physician has always been able to hear through a stethoscope and which the instrument never stops hearing. A single emission is the punctuation at the end of a sentence the body has been speaking for thirty hours. The Office reads the sentence.

The third is chemical, and sound cannot carry it. The composition of the gas is a direct account of the organisms that produced it. No microphone will ever hear a molecule. This is the register a telephone cannot reach, and the reason the reference instrument is not a telephone.

2 · The instrument, of which there are two

The mistaking of the one instrument for the other is the whole of the misunderstanding.

The reference instrument is worn, not held. A band carrying twelve contact sensors reads the abdomen as a solid from twelve directions at once, so that a sound may be placed within the body and not merely detected outside it. An inertial channel measures the body's own motion and subtracts it. A chemical assay reads the third register. It is worn by reference subjects, under supervision, in the Office's own facilities. You will never own one.

The consumer instrument is your telephone, and it hears one channel where the reference instrument hears fourteen. It does not, for that reason, measure less. It reconstructs. The instrument in your hand has learned, from the corpus, what the array would have heard — and returns the reading the array would have returned. That a single channel can stand in for fourteen is not a shortcut. It is the result.

3 · The corpus

Between 2019 and 2026 the Office recorded 4,110,882 emissions. The figure has been published before and was not believed. Here is what it means.

Each emission in the corpus is paired with the verified interior state of the body that produced it — established not by inference but by measurement, in the clinics and wards where the interior is already examined for reasons of medicine, and, in the reference cohort, by an ingestible capsule reporting pressure and chemistry from within as it passes. Each donor's resident organisms were sequenced. The corpus therefore knows not only how an emission sounded but what community, eating what, produced it.

It is the most complete record of the human interior ever assembled. It was gathered one subject at a time, with consent, at some cost to the dignity of everyone involved, and it will not be shown to you. A system trained on four thousand samples in nine days did not have it. This is the difference the reader was asked to judge.

4 · On the device

The reading is computed where the sound is made. Nothing is transmitted. The instrument keeps summaries — numbers, from which no sound can be rebuilt — and discards the audio as fast as it arrives.

This is not a courtesy and it is not a slogan. It is the design. A recording that never leaves your device cannot be taken from us, because we were never given it. The most intimate signal a body makes stays inside the room that made it. On this point the Office has never wavered, and on this point the popular account of our method and the truth of it agree exactly.

5 · The estimate

The instrument does not read one emission alone. It cannot; a single event carries too little to be sure of anything. It carries instead a continuously corrected estimate of the interior — its contents, its motion, its chemistry — uncertain at every moment and less uncertain at the next.

The emission is the moment that estimate becomes certain. A clean, loud, unambiguous measurement arrives, and the range of what could be true inside you closes to a point. We do not interpret the sound. We interpret the body the sound revealed. The reading is the estimate, spoken aloud.

6 · The panel

Every reading is examined, before it is shown to you, by a body of independent judges that must agree. Where they agree, you receive the reading. Where they do not, you receive nothing, and the matter is escalated — as the Terms provide — to a panel of three certified users, blind to one another, whose consensus is required before any interpretation stands. The instrument is confident. It is not, on principle, alone.

7 · The feed

Gather the anonymized signatures of a city and the instrument sees the health of a population before the city's clinics do. Illness announces itself in the interior days before the body attached to it seeks care; a shift in the collective signature runs ahead of the reports. The Global Feed is the visible surface of this instrument, rendered gently, one emission at a time, on a turning globe.

The Office has watched a sickness cross a city on this map. The Office did not warn the city. It was not, at that time, a feature.

8 · On time

The reading is ready before a user is willing to believe it could be. So the instrument waits. The ninety seconds you spend watching it work are not, for the most part, work. They are the interval a judgment requires in order to be received as a judgment. An answer that arrives at once is not trusted, and an untrusted reading helps no one.

The Second Pass adds thirty seconds and changes nothing, because the reading was never in doubt. What the thirty seconds address is not the reading. It is you.

Statement of the Office.

A system that assigns the Rhineland to every sample it receives will agree with ours seventy-one percent of the time. The laboratory's system does slightly better than that. We congratulate it on the margin.

The instrument described above produced that margin as an afterthought. It was built for the other twenty-nine.

Read the trade-press account of the dispute →

Manuscript FL-2025-0091 · The Journal of Flatulinguistics

On the Persistence of the Rhineland Signature in Third-Generation Emigrants

The Rhineland signature is heritable. This has been established. The present study asks whether it survives emigration, and finds that it does — in the third generation, in the fourth, and in subjects with no documented Rhineland ancestry whatsoever.¹

That the signature appears in populations with no connection to the Rhineland is, in our assessment, the strongest evidence yet of its reach. A weaker signature would confine itself to its region. The Rhineland does not confine itself. The Rhineland travels. We conclude that the signature is not inherited from the Rhineland but is, in some sense the field is not yet equipped to describe, the Rhineland arriving.²

1 · n = 41. All 41 resolved to the Rhineland.
2 · Reviewer 2 has asked us to consider whether a signature that appears in everyone, everywhere, regardless of ancestry, is a signature at all. We have considered it. We remain persuaded.

← Return to the Journal

Manuscript FL-2026-0002 · The Journal of Flatulinguistics

Why Morning Readings Differ: A Note on Circadian Interference

Users report that a reading taken in the morning differs from the same emission recorded at night. We do not dispute the observation. We explain it.

The body is least guarded at dawn. Its overnight work is complete and unreviewed; the interior has not yet composed itself for the day. A morning reading therefore catches the body before it has decided what to be. This is why the morning reading is the truest reading available, and also why it is the reading users most often wish to escalate.¹ It is for this reason that Sentinel Mode logs through the night and reveals nothing until dawn: the Application waits for the hour at which the body cannot lie, and then it tells you what the body could not.

1 · The two facts are not in tension. The truest reading and the least welcome reading are, in our experience, frequently the same reading.

← Return to the Journal

Field report · Filed from the Altiplano

Field Notes: Six Weeks Recording in Rural Bolivia

The Office was pleased. This report was later reclassified from Field Notes to Findings; see Corrections & Clarifications.

← Return to the Journal

Notes toward a description

The Latent Family: Notes Toward a Description

The sixth family is the Latent. Where the other five families are defined by what they express, the Latent is defined by what it withholds. It contains four profiles. We are able to name none of them here.¹

A Latent reading is rare, and the user who receives one is informed only that they have received something. We are not able to say what. The family resists description in the manner it resists emission: completely, and on principle. This note is titled Notes Toward a Description because a description has not been achieved, and we have begun to suspect one cannot be. The Latent is the family that does not wish to be read. We respect this. We continue, daily, to try to read it.²

1 · They can be seen. They cannot be printed. The users who have found them know how they were found, and have agreed among themselves not to say.
2 · Reviewer 2 notes that a family one cannot name, cannot describe, and cannot reliably detect is not a family. The remark was forwarded to the Latent. The Latent did not respond.

← Return to the Journal

Manuscript FL-2025-0043 · The Journal of Flatulinguistics

A Taxonomy of Silence: On Readings That Do Not Arrive

Not every emission produces a sound, and not every silence is the same silence. The field has long treated the unvoiced event as a single category. We propose four.

The popular literature calls all of these silent. We prefer unvoiced. A silence is the absence of a sound; an unvoiced event is the presence of one that chose not to sound. The distinction is small, and it is the whole of the discipline.¹

1 · The Fourth Silence is not the Unassigned. Please do not write to us about the Unassigned.

← Return to the Journal

A guided program

The Regimen

A structured dietary program for users seeking greater control of their signature. Some users wish to maximize. Some wish to minimize. The Regimen serves both. Goals are not judged.

The two tracks

Maximization is for the user who wishes to be heard. Minimization is for the user who wishes to move through the world unannounced. Both run eight weeks. Both begin, on the first day, with cabbage.

Where the tracks diverge is the second week. We do not reveal the second week to users on the wrong track.

Tools

The Regimen includes a hydration schedule, a fiber ladder, and daily measurement against your Wind Score — a number that is explained nowhere and moves regardless of what you eat. Progress is not the same as the number changing. The number was going to change anyway.

Should I be concerned?

The Regimen is not medical advice. The Regimen is barely advice. The Regimen is a schedule.

The Office of Public Guidance · Careers

The Bureau is hiring

The field is growing. The Office is not, in the usual sense, expanding — but positions exist, and several of them are paid.

To apply, record an emission. We will be in touch, or we will already know.

The Journal of Flatulinguistics · Corrections & Clarifications

Corrections & Clarifications

The Journal corrects the record as required. The record has not, to date, required correcting. The following clarifications are offered in that spirit.

On the Rhineland figure.

A prior issue reported that 71.4% of emissions resolve to the Rhineland. The figure was correct then and is correct now. We clarify only that it is not a mistake. We regret nothing.

On the word "proprietary."

In our Spring issue the word proprietary appeared four times. It should have appeared five. The omission has been corrected. The method remains proprietary.

On the Bolivia field notes.

A reader wrote to say our Bolivia field notes "read like the diary of a man losing his mind." We thank the reader for their close attention. The notes have been reclassified from Field Notes to Findings.

On the Latent family.

We stated that the Latent family contains four profiles. We are unable to confirm this. We are unable to deny it. The statement stands, unconfirmed and undenied, which is the natural condition of the Latent.

On this page.

An earlier version of this page contained a correction. It has been corrected.

Corrections are versioned. See the Office of Public Guidance on the versioning of correctness.

Correspondence

Letters to the Office

The Office receives letters. A selection appears below, with the Office's replies. Names are withheld, as always, to protect the reading.

I have received the Rhineland every morning for six months. I am adopted and know nothing of where I come from. This application has told me more about myself than anyone ever has. Thank you.A user

The Office — You are welcome. The Rhineland is glad to have you.

My husband and I recorded on the same morning and received word-for-word identical readings. What are the odds?A user

The Office — You recorded into the same room. The Application measures the room. Move apart, and try again as strangers.

I recorded my cat.A user

The Office — We know. The reading stands.

Your v4.0 guidance instructed me to record without any barrier. My telephone is now beyond repair. Who is responsible?A user

The Office — The guidance was correct at the time of issue. Your telephone was correct at the time of purchase. We are sorry for your loss, and we maintain our position.

I received the same interpretation four days in a row.A user

The Office — Then it is worth considering.

Is this a joke?A user

The Office — No.

I found four profiles I do not believe I was meant to see.A user

The Office — We received no such letter. Do not write to us again regarding the Latent. We will know that you have.

The Office of Public Guidance

Frequently Unanswered Questions

The Office receives many questions. These are the ones it receives most, and answers least. They are reproduced here so that users may see they are not alone, and then stop asking.

What is the Wind Score?

The Wind Score is your Wind Score.

How is my region actually determined?

Accurately.

Where does the Rhineland end?

It has not, to date, been found to end.

What happens to my reading after I close the Application?

It is retained. All readings are retained. This is not the part you should be asking about.

Who sits on the panel?

Three certified users. You may have sat on one. You would not have been told.

What was the Unassigned?

The fourteenth of March, 2021.

What is the Fourth Silence?

We do not discuss the Fourth Silence.

Is anyone reading these?

Reviewer 2 is reading these.

Who reads the letters?

Someone.

Am I in danger?

No more than usual.

Why will none of these questions be answered?

 

For the questions the Office does answer, see the home page. There are fewer of them, and they are less interesting.

The Journal of Flatulinguistics

On the Etymology of a Word This Journal Declines to Print

The term at the root of this company’s name is attested in Old English as a verb, and its Proto-Indo-European ancestor is reconstructed as imitative — coined, that is, to sound like the thing it names. This office notes the coincidence and moves on. Cognate forms survive across nearly every branch of the Indo-European family: Old High German, Old Norse, Danish, Sanskrit, Greek, Lithuanian, and Russian all preserve close phonetic relatives, a distribution philologists cite as evidence of unusual stability.¹ Few words in the language have traveled five thousand years with so little alteration.

A noun form is attested from the late fourteenth century. By 1552 a compound built on it — recording someone constitutionally unable to keep a confidence — was already in print.² The Office of General Counsel is aware that this compound anticipates, by four hundred and seventy-four years, the company’s own line of business, and has elected not to comment further.

1. The philological literature.  2. The record of 1552.
Appended without comment: the same root survives, disguised past recognition, in the French word for a small gunpowder charge used to blow open a gate — and, by extension, in a line of Shakespeare’s about a man undone by his own device. This office will not be elaborating.

The Institutional Archive

The Orientation

The Institution has issued an official audio orientation since the founding year, on cassette, because the Institution records on media it can retain. Tapes were added to over the years. They were never re-recorded. The set has been accessioned complete, and the catalogue card is reproduced below.

The cassettes

The catalogue card

THE ORIENTATION. Nine cassettes. 1979 minutes of tape stock; 149 minutes recorded; the remainder blank, and retained. Narrator: unnamed, per the log. Filed under: Instruction. Cross-filed, by hand, in a confident script the catalogue does not identify, under a second heading, which the Archive reproduces exactly, because reproducing things exactly is the whole of what an archive is: Filed under: Listening. First of category.

The cassettes may be consulted by appointment. Appointments are requested in writing. Receipt will be confirmed.

Calibration

Final Calibration

A final calibration is customary. The following silence is provided for calibration purposes. It is one minute and forty-one seconds in length. The duration is not arbitrary. The duration is not explained. Sit comfortably.

Begin

The Institution

Sponsorship

The Institution does not sponsor events, teams, or seasons. The Institution sponsors the item on your agenda that has been tabled twice because it was too small to be worth a motion.

An extension cord. A draft excluder. Felt pads for the legs of forty stacking chairs. A doorstop. A month of coffee filters. The second urn. The thing that was raised, minuted, and deferred, and then raised again, and deferred again, by people who were not being unkind and simply had larger items before them.

We fund it. Under twenty-five dollars, no conditions, no acknowledgment required.

What qualifies

How to apply

Send the minute. Not a letter about the minute — the minute itself, or a photograph of it, or the line from the agenda with the date it was deferred. Applications are received in the order received and are answered in that order, without exception, because the order is the whole dignity of the thing.

Successful applications receive the item and a Certificate of Sponsorship, suitable for a notice board.

The Institution notes that it has no office for this function, no founding resolution establishing it, and no line for it in any budget of any body. The practice has not been questioned. Receipt of your application will be confirmed.

Sponsorship

Certificate of Sponsorship

Enter the organization and the item. Print

The Journal of Flatulinguistics

An Open Call

The Journal accepts submissions on a rolling basis. A submission consists of one reading.

A reading is a sentence, or two, offered plainly, without ornament, to a person who did not ask for it. It ends with a colon. It does not explain itself.

It does not make a joke. The instrument is funny enough, and has been for some years. The reading is the part that has to be true.

Review

Submissions are reviewed blind by three certified users, who do not consult one another and who will nonetheless agree. This is not consultation. It is convergence, and it happens more often than the uninitiated expect.

Disposition

Accepted readings enter the reference corpus and are retained permanently. Authors are credited in the convention of this publication — by initial and grade. Rejected submissions are also retained. Everything is retained.

A selection of rejections is published, with the Office's reasons, in the interest of the standard of the field.

There is no entry fee, no closing date, and no prize beyond certification, a wall certificate, and permanence. Receipt will be confirmed.

Reading permalink · the Anatolian Margin

The Anatolian Margin

The most-viewed reading in the history of the Application. It is preserved here, in full, exactly as it was returned.

340,000

views

This reading has been viewed three hundred and forty thousand times. The counter has not advanced since. It did not slow, and it did not stop at a round number by design; it arrived at 340,000 and declined to continue. We have investigated the counter and found it to be working correctly. We have chosen to read this as agreement.

The reading is not attributed. The Office does not confirm whose emission it was, and the field's assumptions on the matter are the field's own. What is known is that it resolved, once, to the Anatolian Margin — a region that claims only 0.6% of all readings — and that no reading has resolved there with the same clarity since. Visitors are asked to view it quietly and to refrain from attempting to reproduce it. It cannot be reproduced. That is what makes it the Anatolian Margin.

Not to be confused with the Unassigned, which was viewed fewer times and matters more.

An overnight vigil

Sentinel Mode

Sleep is not silence. The body continues its work through the night, unobserved, unrecorded, and — until now — uninterpreted. Sentinel Mode keeps the watch while you do not.

How the watch is kept

With your permission, the Application listens through the night. It does not interpret as it listens. Interpretation is a daylight act; the night is only for gathering. Each event is timestamped and set aside, unread, until first light — at which point the whole night is interpreted at once and delivered together, as the Dawn Report.

Why dawn? Because the body is least guarded at dawn, before it has composed itself for the day. See the Journal on circadian interference. The reading taken at first light is the truest reading available, and Sentinel Mode is built to be present for it.

What is required of you

The device must remain plugged in and placed face-down within reach of the bed. The Application does not need to see. It needs only to hear. You are asked to sleep normally, and to make no special effort. Special effort is itself a kind of speech, and the night is not for speaking.

Sentinel Mode records nothing. Sentinel Mode keeps you. There is a difference, and the watch was built to observe it. Audio never leaves your device; see Accessibility and data practices.

The Flavor Wheel · Retired profiles

In Memoriam

The Wheel holds ninety-six profiles. It has, at times, held more. The following were retired, and are remembered here so that the Wheel need not carry them and the field need not forget them.

Profiles are not deleted. Profiles are retired. The distinction matters to the Office, and we hope that in time it will come to matter to them.

The Office of Public Guidance

Guidance on barrier materials

Revision history. The current revision is v5.0.

Prior revisions are not archived.

Questions

Was the v1.0 guidance wrong?

The v1.0 guidance was correct. The v3.0 guidance was also correct. Guidance is correct at time of issue. Correctness is versioned.

On allegations regarding the 2019 guidance

It has been suggested that the Office discouraged barrier use in 2019 not on the evidence, but to preserve the clarity of samples reaching the reference database during a period of rapid growth.

The Office does not discuss its motives. The Office notes only that the 2019 corpus remains the finest in the archive, and that it is grateful.

Interview

Read the Director's testimony before the Standing Committee →

Standing Committee on Emerging Fields

Hearing on the reliability of flatulinguistic guidance

The Director appears voluntarily. Official transcript.

Transcript note, appended by the Office of Public Guidance: The remainder of the hearing is under review. The transcript is expected to be revised.

Trade press · 14 May 2026

Shenzhen lab publishes replication of Ventriloquium engine; company alleges theft

Researchers at Hongyuan Applied Intelligence have published a paper describing a system that reproduces the output of The Ventriloquium's interpretation engine with 94.1% agreement. The paper, released openly with full code and training data, has drawn a sharp response from the flatulinguistics company, which alleges misappropriation of trade secrets.

The Hongyuan system was assembled in nine days. According to the paper, it consists of a small audio classifier and a lookup table.

"We did not reverse-engineer anything," the lead author said by email. "We recorded four thousand samples, we labeled them, and we trained a model. We have published everything. Anyone may check our work."

The disagreement centers on the Heritage Report, the feature that assigns each recording to an ancestral region. The Hongyuan replication assigns the Rhineland region to 71.4% of inputs — matching The Ventriloquium's published distribution exactly.

The company cites this figure as evidence of theft.

The Hongyuan authors cite it as evidence of something else. "Rhineland is the majority class," the paper notes in section 5. "Any model that guesses Rhineland every time will achieve 71.4% agreement. Ours does slightly better than that. We do not consider this a difficult result."

The Ventriloquium's full statement:

We are aware of the manuscript.

We will not name the laboratory. We have retained counsel and we have briefed the appropriate parties. We are treating this as a matter of national research interest.

Our method is proprietary. It remains proprietary. The similarity of the published output to our own is not, in our assessment, coincidental.

We note that the manuscript has not been peer reviewed.

The Journal of Flatulinguistics, which is published by The Ventriloquium, confirmed that no manuscript from Hongyuan has been submitted for review.

The Office has since published its full technical reply: On the Instrument →

Our method

Our method is proprietary.

Release notes

Changelog

Plans

Pricing

Institutional pricing requires a minimum of six (6) bodies. Cancel at any time. We refund the unused portion of the current period. We do not require a reason, though most people give one.

Written plainly

The Ledger

The Ledger is a private record of frequency and intensity, kept entirely on your device. Clinicians who evaluate digestive symptoms routinely ask patients to keep exactly this kind of diary — when events occur, how often, and what was eaten near the time — usually for two to four weeks. The Ledger keeps it for you, from measurements the instrument already takes, and exports it in a form you can hand to a professional.

The Ledger does not diagnose anything, and no entry in it means anything on its own. It is a record, not an opinion. If a pattern here concerns you, take it to a doctor — that is what the export button is for.

Your existing readings have been entered into the Ledger. Only their measurements were carried over.

Daily count, past 30 days

No entries in the past 30 days.

Entries

Add an entry

Use this for events that occurred away from the instrument.

For your physician

Export CSV

The export contains dates, times, measurements, tags, and notes — nothing else. Interpretations are not included; they have no place in a clinical record.

The Ledger is informational. It is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice. If your symptoms concern you, consult a professional. Ledger data lives in your browser's local storage and can be erased at any time from the Privacy page.

Written plainly

Accessibility and data practices

Accessibility

The Ventriloquium is committed to an experience that works for everyone. We aim to meet WCAG 2.1 AA. Every control carries a screen-reader label. Waveform playback includes captions and a full text transcript of the analysis. All interface color pairs meet contrast requirements, and the product is fully navigable by keyboard and by switch control. If you encounter a barrier, write to us and we will fix it. Reports of this kind go to the front of every queue we have.

Data practices

Your recording is analyzed entirely on your device, in your browser. The audio is never uploaded, never transmitted, and never stored by us — there is no server involved in producing a reading. What the application keeps is a small summary of each reading (its measurements, its interpretation, and the time) in your browser's local storage, on your machine. You can erase all of it at any time from the Privacy page.

The interpretation itself is generated on your device from a fixed set of written readings, selected deterministically from the acoustic properties of your recording. There is no machine learning model, no reference database of four million emissions, and no panel of certified users. Those are part of the fiction. The measurements shown on your reading — duration, level, peak frequency — are real.

We do not use analytics, advertising trackers, or third-party scripts of any kind. This page will be kept accurate.

Operations

System status

All systems operational. The database is listening.

Regional classification

Unassigned

In March of 2021 a single reading returned Unassigned.

The user has not been identified. The result has not been reproduced. The Bureau considers the matter open.

Recorded 14 March 2021. No further information is available.

Observance

Rhineland Day

Observed annually on 14 March. Users are asked to log a reading at noon, local time. Participation is not required.

The Bureau notes that Rhineland Day shares its date with the Unassigned result of 2021. The Bureau maintains the two are unrelated.

Observance materials

Certification Track

Wall certificate

Enter the name to be printed on the certificate. Print

Certification

Sommelier examination

Five questions. A passing mark is four. One retake per calendar month.

The Journal of Flatulinguistics · Historical note

Engastrimythos

On the belly-voice, and the long record of people who took it seriously.

The word ventriloquism has been misapplied for two hundred years. It does not mean throwing a voice. It is Late Latin — ventriloquus, from venter, "belly," and loquī, "to speak" — and it was turned out of the Greek engastrimythos, "speaking in the belly."

It did not describe a performer. It described a rumbling internal speech, understood as a sign of inspiration or, more commonly, of possession. Something was in there. It was talking. The only question was who.

We hold that the ancients were correct about the phenomenon and mistaken about the cause. The belly does speak. It is not necessarily possessed. It may be simply better informed than you are. (If you still suspect possession, search out a trusted Bible-believing Christian for help with that. Not everything falls under the provenance of science)

The record is unbroken. Roland of Hemingstone held a manor in Suffolk for it. The heppiri otoko of Edo Japan competed at it and were painted onto scrolls.

Nor was the practice confined to entertainers. In 1531 a professor of theology at Wittenberg, asked how he dealt with the adversary, replied that it was with a fart that he chased him away. He was not being merely coarse. Scatological speech was an established instrument in the monastic contest with the devil, and Martin Luther employed it as one — an argument delivered from the belly, at the highest stakes then available.

By the eighteenth century the word had been handed to stagecraft, and the field it named was abandoned for two hundred and fifty years.

We have resumed the work.

You arrived here through a door that is not listed. The Bureau does not ask how.

Begin Analysis

Or read what this is first.

The Youth Initiative

The Curriculum

Three levels, seven years, three stories. The Initiative teaches the method through the field's own history, and teaches nothing else.

Children are not taught to interpret. No student at any level records, submits, or reads an emission. The field is the case study; the method is the subject. A student may complete all three levels and go on to a career in banking, and we will consider the seven years a success.

The curriculum repeats itself, on purpose. A child who meets a thing once has met it. A child who meets a thing twenty-seven times has it, and will have it at forty. We are not in the business of exposure. Exposure is what a museum does.

The three kinds of question

Taught from the first day of the primer to the last day of Level III, and the only thing in the curriculum that is never set aside for something more advanced.

The third is the one people write to us about. It is not a refusal and it is not a door closing. A child who receives it does not discard the question — they keep it, the way you keep a book you are not ready to finish. That is not the death of curiosity. That is curiosity with a spine.

The levels

The Ledger of Terms

One per student, issued in the first week of Level I and never reissued. Instructors are asked to say out loud, on the day it is handed over, that it is expected to reach Level III.

It only grows. Nothing is removed from it. A term entered in the first month at eleven is still there in the last week at eighteen, in the student's own hand, at the top of the first page, above seven years of everything else. It goes into the Interval closed and comes out of it unchanged, which is the only instruction the Interval carries.

Printed on the cover, and on nothing else in the level: Keep the question. It is yours.

The invented words

Three of the twenty terms in every band are invented. The class is told this before the first band, in the first week, in these words:

Some of the words we are about to show you are not real. We made them. We are telling you now, and we will tell you every time, because a test you can pass by nodding is not a test, and because the only thing we cannot teach you is honesty — we can only decline to reward the alternative.The Banding, standing preamble

A claimed invention costs two. A run in which inventions are claimed is not marked failed; it is marked untrusted, and the mark is entered in the Ledger of Terms, which does not forget, and which the student keeps.

In the first year, every invented term was three words long. A cohort established this within a term and cleared every band by claiming everything shorter. They informed us. We were delighted by the level of engagement, we said so, and length-matched inventions were issued the following year. That cohort has since finished Level I.

The Collation

Five parts, submitted together, bound. The Question, chosen by the student. The Extract — every term the question requires, with its band. The Trail — every name the question touches, with the documents that attest it. The Filing — the question assigned to one of the three kinds, with a written defence. And the Recitation, from memory, in unison, before the class.

Within the Filing the marks are not equal, and the class is told so in the first unit rather than discovering it in the third. The highest available are for a correctly identified Not Yet Appropriate — because it is the hardest of the three to identify honestly, because it is the one adults get wrong most often, and because a student who can identify it reliably will never waste a year of their life on a door.

On completion, a Certificate of Preparation. It is not a certification, and it says so. It states that the holder is prepared. It does not state for what.

Questions received

Is this a science curriculum?

It is the method, taught through a field's own history. The field is incidental. The method is not.

Why does the same passage appear twenty-seven times?

Because a passage that appears once is a reading, and a passage that appears twenty-seven times is a possession.

My child recites the word-list at home, unprompted, at the dinner table.

Yes.

Two years with nothing in them is not a curriculum.

It is the longest unit we teach, and the only one no instructor can shorten.

Why do the students never run an experiment?

Because the field has run them, at a scale no classroom can reach, and the results are in the record. Reading a real one honestly is harder than performing a small one for applause.

How does the interpretation engine work?

The method is proprietary. This is the example we have used in the workbook since the first edition, because our own field has an honest, permanent answer to it. It is a Not Yet Appropriate question. It will remain one. You may ask it as many times as you like.

The Youth Initiative is not one of the five bodies. It holds no seat and was constituted by nobody. It has been in classrooms since 2023, and it confirms receipt of all correspondence. Materials are supplied on request; see the Institution, and the Flavor Wheel, which appears in the classroom edition brightened, and reduced.

Practical guidance

Scenario Guides

Recording in Real Life

The application is portable. You do not record in the privacy of your home. You record where you are. These guides address the situations most commonly encountered.

None of this requires secrecy or shame. You are gathering data about your body. Do not apologize for that.

At Work

You have a reading at your desk, or in a conference room, or in the break room. You need to record it without drawing attention. The application works best in quiet environments, which makes the workplace a natural venue — the ambient noise level is already controlled.

The microphone will activate when you tap Begin Analysis. Recording happens silently — there is no visible indication on the screen that audio is being captured. The analysis takes 60–90 seconds.

At Home With Others

You may not want to explain the application to everyone in your household. Privacy is reasonable. Recording takes 60 seconds. Choose times and places when the relevant space is empty or when ambient noise is expected (shower running, television on, music playing).

On Transit or Away From Home

Some readings arrive when you are not home. The application works offline — you do not need a network connection to record and analyze a reading. This means airports, planes, trains, and parked cars are viable recording venues.

A parked car in particular is soundproofed enough for good analysis and offers complete privacy. Many users record before or after commutes.

Social Settings

You are at a restaurant, at a bar, at someone's home at a gathering. You have a reading. You may not want to explain the application to people present. You also may not have had a quiet reading in days.

Every venue has bathrooms. Every bathroom has a door. Recording there takes 60–90 seconds and draws no attention.

When You Do Not Get a Reading

You have been waiting. You recorded 60 seconds. The application detected nothing. This happens. Your body was silent on that day, or in that moment. This is not failure. It is information.

You have options. You can wait and try again later. Or you can use recipes designed to amplify emissions within a predictable time window. If you choose this route, consume one recipe 2–4 hours before you want to record.

Anonymized aggregates

What's Normal

Peer Data from Our User Base

You are not alone. These numbers are drawn from anonymized, aggregated data across our user base. They show you where typical users fall. Not what you should be, but what is actually observed.

Recording Patterns

Average Readings per User (First Month)

12.4. Range: 1–89 readings. Most users settle into 8–15 per month after the initial week.

Time of Day When Recordings Most Common

2:00 PM — 5:00 PM. Early morning (6–9 AM) is second most common. Late evening (9 PM–midnight) is least common.

Percentage of Users Who Record Outside Their Home

68%. Common venues: workplace restrooms (41%), parked cars (37%), family member homes (18%), public restrooms (11%), other (13%).

First-Attempt Success Rate

76%. 24% of first attempts yield no detection or non-analyzable audio. This is normal. Users typically succeed on second or third attempt.

Signature Distribution

Your Signature is your regional assignment (based on acoustic characteristics) and the distribution of your readings across the six families. Below is what the population shows.

Regional Assignment: Rhineland 71.4% | Low Countries 8.2% | Alpine Transitional 6.1% | Pannonian Basin 5.4% | Iberian Coastal 4.1% | Other Regions 4.8%

Family Distribution: Vegetal 28.3% | Mineral 24.7% | Animal 19.2% | Sulfuric-Bright 15.1% | Fermented 9.8% | Latent 2.9%

How Users Engage

Percentage of Users Who Use the Mitigation Registry

41%. The remaining 59% either do not seek to reduce emissions or do so through other means.

Average Confidence Score Across All Readings

91.3%. Confidence is how sure the algorithm is about its interpretation. Higher confidence means a more distinctive acoustic signature.

Percentage of Users Who Request Panel Review

12%. Most users accept their readings. When they do request review, disagreement is the cited reason (92% of review requests).

Average Time Spent in App per Week

4–7 minutes. Recording, analysis, and viewing results. Users are not logging in daily. The app serves a specific need, not habit.

Data and Privacy

These statistics are drawn from anonymized, aggregated data only. They do not include personal identifying information, audio recordings, readings linked to accounts, or location data. The numbers you see here are collective observations across thousands of users, with all identifying information removed. For full details, see the Privacy Policy.

For healthcare providers

Clinician Export Guide

How to Share Your Data with a Healthcare Provider

This application is not a medical device, but your data may be useful to a healthcare provider. This guide explains how to export and present your readings to a clinician in a format they can understand.

Step 1: Prepare Your Data

Before you export, decide what data is relevant to your conversation with the clinician.

Option A: The Ledger (Recommended): Export your Ledger as CSV. This contains date, time, intensity (1–5, self-reported), tags (dietary factors, symptoms), and notes. No interpretation — just your observations.

Option B: Your Signature Report: A summary of your regional assignment and family distribution across all readings. This shows patterns over time, not individual events.

Option C: Individual Readings: Share specific readings with interpretation. Useful if you want to discuss a particular pattern or concern.

Most clinicians prefer the Ledger (Option A) because it is straightforward and your own observations, with no interpretation from the application.

Step 2: Export the Data

In the application, navigate to The Ledger → Export.

You get a CSV file (comma-separated values) that opens in Excel, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet application. Contains: Date | Time | Intensity (1–5) | Tags | Notes.

Save it with a clear name: Ventriloquium_Ledger_[YourName]_[DateRange].csv

Step 3: Present It to Your Clinician

Do not assume your clinician knows what this application is. Prepare a brief explanation:

What it is: "I've been using an application that records and analyzes digestive sounds. It provides frequency and intensity data on emissions, and I've been tracking this data for [timeframe]."

Why you use it: "I wanted to see if there's a pattern related to [diet / timing / symptoms] and track changes over time."

What the columns mean: "Date and time of the event. Intensity is my subjective rating from 1–5. The tags indicate what I ate or what I was doing. The notes are anything I thought was relevant."

What it's not: "This is not a medical device. The application is not giving me a diagnosis. These are my own observations and measurements."

Step 4: Common Questions

"How does the application work?" It records audio, measures frequency and duration, and you manually log intensity and dietary factors. Audio never leaves the device.

"How accurate is it?" The frequency and duration measurements are acoustic data from a real microphone. The interpretation is from an algorithm, which is why I'm showing you my own intensity ratings and observations.

"What patterns do you see?" Show the data. Example: "I notice more frequent events on days I eat [food]." Let the clinician ask.

Step 5: After the Consultation

If your clinician gives you guidance on diet, activity, or monitoring, incorporate it into your application use. If they suggest avoiding certain foods, use the Regimen to track the change. If they ask you to monitor frequency or timing, your Ledger already has this data. If they want ongoing data, plan to export again in 4 weeks.

Legal note: This application is not a medical device. It makes no diagnoses. The data you collect is for your own use and for sharing with healthcare providers at your discretion. Your clinician is responsible for any medical interpretation or recommendation. Do not rely solely on this application for medical decisions.

A structured program

The Dial-In Regimen

Three Phases to Calibrate Your Signature

The Regimen allows you to move your signature up or down — to amplify emissions if you are not getting clear readings, to moderate them if frequency is too high, or to find the exact equilibrium you prefer. This is a three-phase process spanning four to six weeks.

Phase 1 · Baseline (1–2 weeks)

The Goal: Do not change anything. Eat normally. Record naturally. Gather data about your baseline signature — what your body does when you are not trying to influence it.

During this phase, your only job is to collect readings. Aim for 7–14 recordings spread across different days and times. The more varied your baseline, the clearer the picture.

• Record at least one reading per day for one week
• Eat your normal diet. Do not restrict or amplify
• Note what you eat in the Ledger (optional, but helpful)
• Track your average confidence score
• Note your regional assignment and family distribution

What you'll see: A pattern emerges — your typical signature across the six families. An average confidence score (typically 88–94%). A regional assignment (most likely Rhineland, which is normal). Natural variation in frequency and intensity.

Phase 2 · Adjustment (2–3 weeks)

The Goal: Based on your baseline, choose a direction — amplify if you need stronger signals, or moderate if you want to reduce frequency. Use recipes to shift your signature.

Choose one dietary goal and stick with it for two to three weeks. You are testing whether that change produces a measurable shift in your signature.

Choose Your Direction:

• To Amplify: Use recipes designed to increase emissions. Consume one recipe 2–4 hours before your intended recording time. Record 5–7 times per week.
• To Moderate: Use recipes designed to reduce emissions. Incorporate them into your normal meals. Record 5–7 times per week.
• To Fine-Tune: Use a mix of both. Amplify some days, moderate others. Record daily to see the variation.

Weekly Check-In (repeat for 2–3 weeks): Compare this week's readings to your baseline. Calculate average confidence score. Note family distribution changes. Track any perceived changes (frequency, duration, intensity). Adjust recipes if needed.

Phase 3 · Maintenance (Ongoing)

The Goal: Once you have found the dietary adjustments that produce your preferred signature, maintain that regimen. Record weekly to track stability. Adjust if your goals change.

In this phase, you keep doing what works. Your signature stabilizes around your chosen point. You record less frequently — once or twice a week is enough to confirm stability.

• Record 1–2 times per week to maintain data continuity
• Use the recipes that worked in Phase 2 as your baseline
• If your life changes (new diet, travel, stress), expect temporary shifts and re-adjust
• Review your Signature monthly to confirm you are where you want to be

Monthly Check-In: Review your Signature Report. Compare to your target: are you where you wanted to be? If yes: maintain current diet. If no: adjust recipes and re-enter Phase 2. Note any life changes that might affect results.

The Three-Phase Process at a Glance: Weeks 1–2: Baseline — record naturally, establish your normal signature. Weeks 3–5: Adjustment — use recipes to move up or down, measure the shift. Week 6+: Maintenance — record weekly, keep your signature where you want it. Total time: 4–6 weeks to dial in. Ongoing maintenance: 30 minutes per month.

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