I’m also keen to see some innovative uses of Patterns.
In one of my early TT Scenes (which I lost), I used the pattern pages to store randomly generated ‘maps’.
On one pattern page (or map), most of the cells were empty (zero) and numbers represented food for the Turtle. On another pattern page, most of the cells had numbers representing note values in a scale - and a small number of empty cells represented musical rests.
One variable was assigned a number representing the Turtles initial energy.
When the Turtle moved, it used energy. When it landed on a ‘food’ square, it stopped and ‘ate’ some of the food - so the number on the cell representing food went down - and the Turtle’s energy went up. Then its direction was slightly adjusted and it would move off again - playing the note value that had been on the same cell on the note page.
The Turtle’s speed was set by making the Metronome time value inversely proportional to the energy value. So that, when the Turtle was full of food, it travelled quickly and as it began to starve, its movement slowed.
When the Scene was run, the Turtle would travel around the pattern page, until it ran out of energy and most of the food was eaten.
Musically, the result was quite varied - some times the turtle would ‘play’ a long flurry of fast notes and then stop dead. Other times it would play a few notes and then manage to miss the food for a couple of bars before playing a few notes again, slowly coming to a halt.
By adjusting the ranges of the random numbers on the food map and the distribution of notes on the note map, it was possible to conduct the performance. (This could have been adjusted as the Scene ran - with an input from a controller adding food to keep the Turtle alive!)
Hope that makes sense! I lost the Scene because I didn’t back up. I should go back to it now because I think it could be done in a much more interesting way using the Grid page (but still using pattern pages to store the food and notes?)
