Draw a bar for the drops to bounce on, click to drop one
Plink
A music toy: drops fall on the beat and bounce off the bars you draw, and every bounce rings a note set by the length of the bar.
Plink is a small machine for making music without knowing any. Droppers along the top release a drop on every beat. Draw a bar anywhere and the drops bounce off it, and each bounce rings the bar like a chime.
How it works
A bar's note comes from its length, just like a real chime bar: long bars ring low, short bars ring high, and every bar you draw snaps to the nearest note of the scale. The droppers keep different beat intervals, so the piece loops but slowly drifts against itself, the way phasing pieces by Steve Reich do. Drops follow simple physics with gravity and restitution, and the bars light up as they ring.
The voice is a soft mallet on a tuned bar: a sine tone with a quieter, fast-dying inharmonic partial, the way marimba and kalimba bars sound, panned to where the bar sits on screen. The scales are chosen so that any mix of bars sounds good together, so there are no wrong moves.
Built with
- A small 2D physics engine (gravity, bounces, beat-locked droppers)
- Web Audio API: tuned-bar synthesis, stereo panning, scales that always agree
- Canvas 2D rendering