Hi,

Firstly I want to say a huge thank you for the hard and ingenious work you do with Sonic Charge, your programs have revolutionised the way I work as a writer and producer of music. I'm the proud owner of all your products, and look forward to whatever exciting things you've got in the works.

I have a few questions about the future of Patternarium:

I love Patternarium. It's brilliant! For me, it's one of the most useful tools at my disposal for when I've got a writers block, looking to beef up a rhythm section, or want to spice up a client's track with an interesting sound. However, part of me worries that in the future, there might be a situation where you may have to take it offline, or kill the experiment due to a lack of perceived interest in the community. You make these best of generational collections which are so helpful, but if you start to see a dwindling number of votes for each passing generation, when will you decide enough is enough and end the Patternarium? Or are you planning on keeping it going for the foreseeable future?

I guess what I'm asking is that if you were to close it, would you make a small, downloadable version which we could just vote on ourselves and still get similar results?

Will you create a completely new seed and starting 'fresh' as it were at some point? Or do you think the results if we did that would be too, um... experimental?

Last question, are there any plans for making a 'Patternarium' but for Synplant? I think a browser-based generational-voting system could produce some really great results for it. Each one could be demoed by a couple of midi notes going up and down a major scale, or some other simple midi demontration similar to how the Patternarium works for uTonic, then we vote on what sounded good to us and see what happens at the end of the generation. Is this something you've thought of before?

Anyway, thanks for reading, and again I love all the work you do.

Thank you for your post and your support in our madness.

We generally create a new Patternarium version when the current one have over 50000 votes as it gives us good vote coverage over the 1000 patterns. If the interest would dwindle, it would take longer and longer between each generation. This has varied over the years as it also depends on how many new visitors we get to the site that discovers Patternarium for the first time. We still have somewhere around 1500 to 2000 people voting each generation so we have all intentions on keeping it going.

We also do tweaks to the algorithm from time to time when we feel that the sounds or styles have converged too much or the positive/negative vote ratio have dropped too low. For example, in generation 16, we crossbreed from all previous generations.

It is not possible to start from completely scratch as it will always require some starting material to vote on (generation 1 was a collection of factory presets). We could start from complete random, but I do not think anyone have the patience for all the generations it would take for it to become something bearable. 🙂

Patternarium for Synplant is an interesting idea, but harder to realize in a practical solution. Different sounds work in different notes, chords, melodies or songs. I also think that voting for them would be both hard and very tedious. It's like you would have Patternarium today only play one sound in a pre-defined rhythm and then we would take the top votes and try to mix them.

Patternarium is brilliant for new ideas. i love it. long live Patternarium !