Discipline Ugly Patch Competition 2023

Ugly Patch Competition 2023 - Call for Submissions

It's the end of the year and a perfect time to review your old patches lying around. Why not share them with other people? You might notice that what looked like a perfectly nice patch when creating it, is no longer digestable. You are not alone!
We would therefore like to invite you to submit patches for the Patch Beauty Competition.

What to submit

We are interested in Pd-patches that people are using for their performances, installations, teaching or just toying around. Patches that are actually meant to be used (as opposed to patches that were created explicitely to be unreadable, or super clean).

How it works

Once enough patches have been collected, we are going to start an online survey where you can vote for patches according to their readability. The patch that is voted least readable wins.

What's in it for me?

Nothing, really. Apart from the fun of looking at your old (and new) ugly (and gorgeous) Pd-patches. And the fun of looking at the ugly (and cool) Pd-patches of other people.

No way I'm showing my patches. I don't want to be the laughing stock of the community

Fear not! We will not share your precious patches.

Patches are shown to people in an anonymised way (so people don't know where the patch is from, who wrote it and what it is used for), with obfuscated text. Something like this:

Seriously? What is this for?

This is part of an ongoing study to find style guides for patches. E.g. we would like to be able to automatically tell whether a given patch is considered spaghetti code by most people, and eventually warn patch authors if things are going downhill at an early stage, hoping to improve the overall readability of Pd-patches.

Submitting your Patch

Please upload your patches by following the link below. We happily accepth both .pd file and ZIP-files. You can upload as many patches as you like (the more the merrier). If you want to submit a patch that requires abstractions, please submit all of them in a single ZIP-file.

Submit patches!