How to Make a Bouncing Ball Synced to Music
How Rhythmic mode turns bounces into a melody, and the four settings that decide whether it sounds clean or cluttered.
In This Tutorial
How Rhythmic Mode Works
Rhythmic mode holds your chosen song as an ordered queue of notes. Every time the ball hits a wall, a ring or another ball, the engine plays the next note in that queue and moves the pointer forward. It does not pick a note from a scale and it does not guess a pitch from the impact. That is why the melody stays recognisable no matter how chaotic the physics get: the order is fixed, only the timing is physical. With Music Sync on, the engine also steers the bounce timing so impacts land on the beat instead of wherever physics would have put them.
- •If the tune sounds right but the rhythm is loose, Music Sync is off. Turn it on in the Engine tab Add-ons.
- •If you want free physics but still want the notes, leave Music Sync off. The song still plays on every bounce.
Choosing a Song
Open the Audio tab and find Selected Song / MIDI in Rhythmic Mode Settings. The dropdown has two groups. Standard Library holds the built-in melodies that ship with the Studio, around fifty of them, including Megalovania, Tetris, Fur Elise, Canon in D, Imperial March, Mario, Pokemon, Zelda, Take On Me and Seven Nation Army. MIDI Files (Cloud) holds anything you have uploaded yourself. Built-in melodies are stored as note sequences, so they always play cleanly in order.
- •Melodies with a strong stepwise shape, like Fur Elise or Tetris, read best because a listener can follow the line.
- •A melody with many repeated notes, like Rush E, will sound flat unless you also vary the visuals.
Stopping the Song From Racing Ahead
The most common problem is the melody outrunning the music because tiny contacts fire notes. Three settings fix it, all in Rhythmic Mode Settings. Min Bounce Spacing sets the shortest gap in milliseconds between two sounding bounces and accepts 0 to 1000 in steps of 10. Min Bounce Distance requires the ball to travel a minimum distance before another note can fire, and accepts 0 to 400. Min Speed Cap ignores impacts below a speed threshold and accepts 0 to 200. Raise Min Bounce Spacing first, it is the bluntest and most reliable of the three.
- →Min Bounce Spacing: 0 to 1000 ms, step 10
- →Min Bounce Distance: 0 to 400
- →Min Speed Cap: 0 to 200 | Max Speed Cap: 0 to 1000
- →Playback Speed: 0.1x to 4x, step 0.1
- →Sync Offset: -500 to +500 ms
Pacing and Offset
Playback Speed scales how fast the whole piece advances and accepts 0.1x to 4x. Use it to fit a melody into a target clip length without changing physics. Sync Offset shifts the audio against the visual by -500 to +500 milliseconds, which corrects the small perceived lag between seeing an impact and hearing it. If you are exporting for a platform that re-encodes audio, test the offset on the uploaded file rather than in the Studio preview. Decouple Ball Speed lets the ball keep its own velocity while the melody advances on its own schedule.
- •Set Playback Speed before you set Sync Offset. Changing the speed moves the perceived offset.
- •Play Original Song plays the source track underneath the bounce notes, which thickens a thin melody.
Escalation Over the Clip
A clip that runs at one intensity for thirty seconds loses people. Rhythmic Mode Settings has an Acceleration Mode that ramps the simulation over time, with an Acceleration Rate of 0 to 0.5 and an Acceleration Factor of 0 to 0.1. Circle Size Multiplier, which accepts 0.5x to 8x, changes how much room the ball has as the piece builds. Pair a gentle acceleration with Pulse Animation and Glow Animation so the arena visibly reacts as the tempo climbs.
- •Animation Sensitivity accepts 0.1 to 5 and controls how hard the pulse and glow react to each note.
- •Small acceleration values go a long way. Start at 0.01 and listen before you go higher.
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