Signal Patterns

Signal patterns are the third input in Tuned's profile — chosen, not calculated. Unlike birthday or energy style, you select your pattern directly from four waveform visualizations during onboarding. The pattern you recognize in yourself is treated as more diagnostically useful than one inferred from indirect data. It describes how your social energy flows over time: its rhythm, its density, and the conditions under which it becomes available.

The four patterns cover the main structural variants in how people maintain presence. The Steady One stays consistent regardless of context or audience. All-or-Nothing peaks hard and then completely drops. Burst-then-Gone concentrates energy in intervals with genuine offline periods between them. Late-but-Deep arrives slowly but sustains longer and goes further than patterns that front-load their intensity. None of these is better or worse — they are structural descriptions, not evaluations.

Signal patterns account for 30% of the resonance score, making them the second-largest factor after frequency archetype. The weight reflects that timing and availability are a significant compatibility variable — two people can share values and communication styles and still struggle if one person's energy is consistently unavailable when the other's peaks. The pattern interaction is not binary (match or mismatch) but weighted: certain cross-pattern dynamics have natural compensation mechanisms, others require active accommodation.

Signal pattern selection works through recognition rather than self-report. You are shown four waveform visualizations during onboarding — not four written descriptions. The waveform you find most legible, most familiar, or most honest is the one you choose. This approach is less susceptible to self-presentation bias than text-based questionnaires. People generally know which rhythm is theirs when they see it, even if they would struggle to describe it in words. The visual format also makes the selection faster and more instinctive, which tends to produce more accurate results than extended reflection.

Signal patterns describe when and how your energy moves — not its quality, intensity, or direction. A Steady One pattern says nothing about whether that consistency is warm or cold, attentive or distracted. An All-or-Nothing pattern says nothing about whether the peak is joyful or exhausting. The pattern is a shape, not a value. Misreading it as a moral category — as if Steady is inherently better than All-or-Nothing — produces the same kind of error as thinking a faster heartbeat is healthier than a slow one. Each pattern has optimal contexts and structural costs that vary by who you are paired with.

Most people's pattern is context-stable — it holds across different relationship types including friends, colleagues, partners, and family. The same structural rhythm that governs your availability in a close friendship tends to govern your availability at work and at home. Some people run different patterns in professional versus personal contexts. If that describes you, the pattern you select during onboarding is treated as your primary social operating mode for compatibility calculation purposes. The choice reflects self-knowledge, and that self-knowledge is the input the algorithm uses.

The interaction between signal pattern and frequency archetype is structural rather than additive. A Spike archetype with an All-or-Nothing pattern operates very differently from a Spike with a Steady One pattern. The archetype determines the behavioral type; the pattern determines the timing. Together they produce a more specific profile than either would alone. When two people compare frequencies in Tuned, the compatibility calculation takes into account not just each person's archetype but also how their pattern rhythms interact — specifically, whether their peaks and gaps align or consistently miss each other.