Do nature metaphors actually make generative music better, or just prettier?

I'm firmly in the raw parameters camp, mostly becuase I've been burned by the opposite. Years ago I built a rainforest-themed ambient box where everything was named after weather, and six months later I genuinely coud not remember wheather 'Mist' was the filter cutoff or the reverb send. The story was fun for a week and then it became a memory tax every time I reached for the thing.

What worked for me was keeping the boring labels underneath and letting the theme live somewhere that doesn't cost anything. On my current box, a simple shift register sequencer on a Pico, the silkscreen just says RATE, DENSITY, DECAY. But I drew a little hand-drawn plant on the front panel with a paint pen, and the LED fades in and out like breathing. Guests still ask about it, and it still makes me smile, but my fingers never have to translate anything.

I'd say try running your patch for a month with the knob caps pulled off and plain numbers written beside them. If you miss the SUN and ROOT naming, that tells you the metaphor is actually doing musical work for you. If you don't miss it, you've learned the same thing I did, wich is that I reach for a machine faster when my brain skips the poetry and goes straight to the parameter.

I land on the other side of this, but not because themed panels are prettier. For me the metaphor earns its keep as a constraint. I built a small patch on a Reverb.com tester board a while back where the whole thing was modeled on a tide pool: one knob for how far the tide came in, one for how long the pool stayed cut off from the sea. Because 'tide' implied slow movement, I mapped everything to long, lazy ramps instead of the snappy envelopes I always default to. The theme literally changed the music, not just the labeling.

I've built maybe a dozen sequencers over the years and the themed ones always die in the drawer, so I thought I'd agree with the plain-label side. But my current one changed my mind for a diferent reason. I have a patch where the controls are named after a garden, and I noticed during a jam that I improvise differently with them. When I turn something called SEASON I make slow, sweeping moves over a whole phrase, but when the silkscreen says TIME I make small corrections. Same math, different hands. My detail: I log every jam in a notebook, and the themed patch gets twice as many pages as my dry ones. So maybe test it not by memory but by what your wrists do.

For me the theme's real value shows up when I share the patch. Mine's named after a beehive, and whenever a friend plays it, they get it instantly. They turn 'HIVE TEMP' and already have a feel for what it'll do before hearing a note. Plain labels like 'randomness amount' just don't spark that same guess. I'd never remember the names myself either though, so I tape a little cheat sheet inside the lid. Best of both, kinda ugly but it works.