Building Calm, ASMR-Style Physics Clips
Instrument choice, note spacing, volume balance and pacing. The settings that make a clip relaxing instead of busy.
In This Tutorial
What Makes a Clip Calm
A relaxing clip is defined by what it does not do. Fewer sounds, spaced further apart, at a lower volume, with slower motion. The Studio does not have a materials system that gives balls wood or glass collision sounds, and it does not have spatial audio or ambient presets. What it does have is the full General MIDI instrument set, precise control over how often notes fire, and independent volume for each layer. That combination is enough, and it is the honest route to the effect.
- •Build calm by removing, not adding. Most busy clips have too many notes, not the wrong ones.
Choosing a Soft Instrument
Instrument choice does most of the work. From the General MIDI set, the voices with a soft attack and long decay suit this best: Music Box, Celesta, Vibraphone, Kalimba, Tinkle Bell and Marimba from the mallet group, and Warm Pad, New Age Pad or Halo Pad from the pad group when you want sustained tone instead of discrete hits. Avoid the brass, distortion guitar and orchestra hit voices, which have a hard transient that reads as an alert rather than a chime.
- •Music Box and Kalimba are the two most reliable choices for this style.
- •Pads sustain, so they blur together at high note rates. Use them only with wide note spacing.
Spacing the Notes Out
This is the setting that matters most. Min Bounce Spacing, in Rhythmic Mode Settings, accepts 0 to 1000 milliseconds and sets the shortest gap between two sounding bounces. For a calm clip, values of 300 to 600 milliseconds give roughly two notes per second, which is around the point where a listener stops parsing rhythm and starts finding it soothing. Min Bounce Distance, 0 to 400, and Min Speed Cap, 0 to 200, further suppress small incidental contacts.
- →Min Bounce Spacing: 0 to 1000 ms, step 10 (use 300 to 600 for calm clips)
- →Min Bounce Distance: 0 to 400
- →Min Speed Cap: 0 to 200
Balancing the Volumes
The Audio tab has three independent volume controls at the top: Main Volume, Music Volume and Bounce Sounds Volume. Set them deliberately rather than leaving defaults. For a calm clip, bring Bounce Sounds Volume down so impacts sit under the music rather than on top of it, and keep Main Volume comfortably below maximum so the platform does not apply aggressive loudness normalisation on upload. Audio Effects, in its own section, holds the post-processing.
- •Export and listen on phone speakers, not headphones. That is how the clip will actually be heard.
Slowing the Motion
Slow motion comes from physics, not from a time-scale slider. Set Gravity low, around 0.01 to 0.04, so the ball drifts. Set Starting Speed low, and set Maximum Speed Limit well below the default 80 so nothing can accelerate into the frame quickly. Keep Bounciness at or slightly below 1 so energy bleeds off gently. Playback Speed in Rhythmic Mode Settings, from 0.1x to 4x, slows the melody separately, which lets you keep the motion readable while stretching the tune.
- →Gravity: 0.01 to 0.04 for drift
- →Maximum Speed Limit: well below the default 80
- →Playback Speed: 0.1x to 4x, step 0.1
Keeping the Visuals Quiet
Match the visuals to the audio. In Collision Effects, either turn the effect off or bring Particles down toward the low end of its 1 to 100 range and Scale toward the low end of 0.1 to 5, because a particle burst on every impact undoes the calm the audio is building. Use a dark background from Obsidian or a custom dark colour, a low Trail Glow, and one or two colours rather than rainbow lighting. Long trails with a low fill opacity read as smooth motion and suit this style well.
- •Turn rainbow lighting off for this style. Cycling hue is stimulating, which is the opposite of the goal.
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