Combine elements from drum machines, software sequencers, Web-based music production applications, and social networking-style voting polls, and you get SonicCharge Microtonic Patternarium -- a new online collaborative patch randomizer for the µTonic (Microtonic) plugin.

The Patternarium site is an online application that generates rhythmic patterns and lets you decide which ones are cool enough to save from extinction. It continuously generates new sounds and rhythms for MicroTonic, and provides the means for you and any other user to vote on whether rhythms are good enough to procreate, or generate a new subspecies of rhythms. SonicCharge calls this process musical Darwinism -- survival of the phattest.

SonicCharge’s servers are regularly generating thousands of unique patterns, each one being the cross product of two other patterns picked at random. The higher the number of votes a certain pattern receives, the more likely it is to get picked and bear offspring into the next generation. By voting on a pattern, you are actively participating and influencing the outcome of Patternarium.

Voting will automatically bring you to the next pattern but you can also click the left and right arrows to browse around without voting. The order in which patterns appear is random and different for each user; however, you can copy the Direct Link below each pattern to share a specific pattern with others.

SonicCharge also notes that the information box that folds out from the upper right corner of the pattern screen will give you some more details about it, including how many people have voted, which pattern the current one descended from, and so forth.

Beyond the fun of looking at and voting on generated patterns, what makes Patternarium worthwhile is the fact that if you come across a pattern (program) that you would like to use, you can save it to disk as an ".mtpg" file and load it into the SonicCharge µTonic (MicroTonic) drum and percussion synth plugin for your own personal use. If µTonic is already open and running on your computer, you can click the Copy button and paste it directly into µTonic, using the Main Menu in µTonic.

A demo version of the plugin, µTonic, can be downloaded from SonicCharge’s Download section. Note that it requires a host application that supports VST 2.4 or Audio Units 2 plugins; if you do not have a host application, you can still try µTonic by downloading a free host such as VSTHost (Windows) or VSTLord (Mac).

If you are wondering what the point of Patternarium is and you have some extra time to kill, visit the site to check it out for yourself. Essentially, it's a patch generator that gives the end user a chance to decide which rhythmic patterns get used in the µTonic plugin.

For more information, please visit soniccharge.com/patternarium.