But that is what I mean with it needing an extension of the language.
So, I'm not saying you could just build a library that calls existing PHP functions to make it all work. Rather I'm saying there's certain machine code instructions, which just cannot be expressed in PHP. And we need those machine code instructions for actually managing memory. So, I am talking about reading/writing to memory not being possible, unless we resort to horrible hacks.
Since we are building our own compiler anyways, we could add our own function-stubs and tell our compiler to translate them to those missing machine code instructions. But then that is a superset of PHP. It wouldn't be possible in PHP itself.
Again, I'm not entirely sure about the above, but my web search skills couldn't uncover any way to actually just read from a memory address in PHP.
What the others wrote is already pretty good. An interesting observation I made in this regard: If you take a white noise sample and cut it really short, it sounds quite a bit like a snare drum.
That's kind of the level of randomness you can expect from various unpitched percussion instruments. They don't just have one tone, or the tone from multiple octaves layered on top of each other, like pitched instruments typically have.
Rather they're all over the place, with many tones layered on top of each other, and those tones change rapidly, too. So, it kind of has many pitches and therefore not really any particular one either.