The GameCube is a memory starved machine - its paltry 24MiB of RAM is tiny compared to its capabilities and storage media, which limited what developers could do with the machine. However, there is an additional 16MiB of RAM connected to the DSP, known as Audio RAM (ARAM). On a memory starved machine, an extra 66% of memory is extremely tempting.
There's a problem, though - the GameCube's CPU does not have direct access to ARAM. All the GameCube's CPU can do with ARAM is tell the DSP to use Direct Memory Access (DMA) to copy data from a range of main memory to ARAM, or vice versa. This is normally used for various DSP functions, such as loading audio samples.
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