I came across Microtonic while seeing one of Richard Devine's videos and wondering "what is that drum machine?" and watched some videos, and found Patternarium and was fascinated about patterns being trained from algorithms.

I also found the script which I think has some trained version of the algorithm in it which is in the scripts.

1. Are the sounds generated as part of the patterns (based on what people are upvoting and whatever pattern/sound it is crossed with?), or are these existing sounds that are just selected, and only the pattern is uptrained?

2. Are there any interesting facts you'd share (top rated tempo for example)?

Amazing work. I am in the infrastructure space working with lidar and imagery recognition, and hear so much hype about "ML models" and whether you call this AI or not (which most of the things people are calling AI (more appropriately ML) is not really), it is one of the best uses of some type of learning algorithms (whether deep learning or not), that I've encountered.

It is really an amazing plugin, and should get more praise. I have been working on getting a youtube channel up around MPE (with Osmose to control things, as well as this concept of MPE effects I've prototyped in VCV Rack), and definitely will cover this.

I found it is such a creativity inspirer, where I can be writing music and go to patterns I've saved to see what gives me a groove I may not have thought of. I do rename them so presets start with tempo, then G## (generation) tag. I went back through all the generations posted of the "Best of" and found about 45% I like... Going through the current generation, I find I like more than that, so it may just be some of the users votes don't correspond with my taste, which of course is great, because that creates different more unique patterns rather than just recycling the same thing if it was only trained from my taste. I do sometimes just export the midi and replace with different sounds depending on what I'm going for if more sample based is more applicable than the electronic drums, but for electronic drums, this thing sounds amazing.

It would be great to have more people find this and join the patternarium ratings every month.

Thanks for this amazing instrument and ongoing support.

Thank you. 💚

Patternarium uses an evolutionary genetic approach where user votes influence the "breeding" ratio of the patterns. You can see this in the info panel by looking at the number of offsprings the good patterns get.

Both patterns and patches are generated, which is why you sometimes get these very slow attack sounds like in this preset: https://soniccharge.com/patternarium#/28/Stochor-Umbranconvent (check the outer purple ring towards the end of the playback)

We've actually never pulled statistics on top tempo. But now that you mention it, here are the median up votes of the top patterns per tempo. (yes, just looking at average votes with these many data points, is just a dull middle.) The spread is quite large but it seems to indicate that very fast and slow tempos are not as popular as more common ones.