Glossary

Terms the interface uses, in the sense it uses them. The Reference defines the same things formally; this page is for reading the app.

Audition

Playing a candidate's pre-rendered, loudness-normalized buffer, rather than the live patch. Everything you hear in a duel has already been through the vetting gate, which is why an unvetted patch can never reach your speakers.

Bank

One of three collections in the left rail: evolution (the live pool), my patches (what you saved), presets (the built-in library). See The patch bank.

Belief row

The line under the toolbar in PLAY saying what the model thinks of the current patch and which coordinates drove that. It reports a silence rather than a number when it has no basis for one.

Brier skill

How much better than a coin flip the model's duel forecasts have been. 0 is chance, 1 is perfect and certain, negative is worse than guessing. Shown in the menu bar and on TRUST.

Budget

The ceilings evolution searches inside: modules, tree depth, modulation depth. Shown in PLAY as 8/24 modules · 6/9 depth · 1/4 mod depth. A patch at its ceilings has no room to grow.

Candidate

A patch in the evolution pool. Has a stable id, a rendered audition buffer, a feature vector and a lineage.

Check duel

A duel whose pair was drawn at random rather than chosen by the pairing rule. Marked ◇ unbiased probe. Calibration measured on these is the number without an asterisk.

Duel

Two candidates, pick one. The primary teaching signal.

Feature vector (φ)

The forty numbers the model sees each patch through: fifteen perceptual descriptors of the standard render, twenty-five structural counts of the term. If a preference is not visible in these, it cannot be learned.

Generation

One round of breeding. Takes the pool's best patches, walks each a short distance uphill on the current model, and injects the children, evicting the weakest to make room.

Genome / term

The patch's real representation: a tree in a typed grammar, not a parameter list. The rack you see is compiled from it.

HELD

The staging tray under the rack. Anything you unplug, delete or bypass goes here rather than vanishing, and stays across a reload.

Lens

See style.

Lineage

The record of what produced a patch: which parent, which step, what changed, and how much the model's estimate moved. Shown in the EVOLUTION strip.

Lock

Freezing a knob, a module or the whole structure so refinement cannot touch it. A locked address cannot be changed, deleted or created.

LUFS

The loudness unit every render is normalized to (−18 LUFS). Louder reliably wins A/B tests, so without it the model would learn "I like loud" and present it as a preference about timbre.

Pool

The evolution bank: 40 vetted candidates the model reasons over and breeds from. (The engine's own default is 48; the web app configures 40.)

Posterior

The fitted model with its uncertainty: a distribution over possible tastes rather than a single best guess. Everything the app shows about confidence comes from its spread.

Prediction

The percentage on a bank row: roughly how likely you are to prefer this patch in a duel. A posterior mean, so it averages the uncertainty away. For the uncertainty itself, read the map's dot sizes.

Quarantine

What happens to a candidate that fails vetting: never played, never shown, and scored so badly that the search learns to avoid that region.

Refit

Full inference over the whole observation log: seconds of work, off the audio thread. Between refits, votes are folded in by the cheaper reweighting path. The wordmark's E lights while a refit runs.

Sample

The standard five-second audition phrase, identical for every patch. Audio measurements are only comparable under an identical stimulus, which is what makes it fixed. It is a measuring instrument, not a demo. Play the patch from the keyboard to judge it.

Standardizer

The scaling that puts the forty raw feature values on a common footing. Saved with the taste profile, always, because the model's coefficients are meaningless without it.

Style

One lens of your taste: a direction in feature space that explains some of your answers. A patch is scored by whichever lens likes it most, which is what lets you prefer several unrelated kinds of sound at once. Up to five; a lens claiming almost none of the bank is idle. Nameable, and worth naming.

Taste model

The whole fitted object: style lenses, star cutpoints, session thresholds, and their uncertainty.

Trace address

The name of one site in the genome: node/0#cut, amp#attack, node/0/m#rate. Panel knobs, hand edits, locks, live parameter handles and search proposals all use the same scheme, so the rack and the genome cannot drift apart.

Utility

The latent quantity everything conditions: how much the model thinks you would like a patch. It is a function it infers rather than a score stored per patch, which is why it can rank a patch it has never shown you.

Vetting

The gate every render passes before it can be heard or measured: all-finite, under a peak ceiling, not silent, not DC-dominated. Evolution does produce screaming resonance and silent duds; this is why you never hear them.

Warm start

The three-of-nine preset pick on first run. Worth 18 pairwise observations for about thirty seconds of work, which is how the model gets past a cold start that otherwise takes hundreds of duels.