Rare Creature Apps
Two modes
Build it yourself, or watch it perform.
Playground is a toy: drop marbles, place ramps and tuned pads, change gravity, see what falls out.
Performance is a machine built around a real score. Timed releases on true ballistic arcs, so every note lands on the beat because a marble genuinely got there in time. Open the link and it runs — no install, no account, nothing to agree to.
watch this bitMachines
Five contraptions, ten pieces.
Melody Rain drops one marble per note onto tuned platforms — melody on the right keyboard, accompaniment and bass on the left, chords falling together. Canon Contraption is the tall cascade. Ring Escape sends marbles through rotating gaps that really are gaps.
Most machines will play most of the pieces, and the app says so when a pairing will not work rather than faking it.
- MachinesCanon Contraption · Melody Rain · Musical Maze · Orbital Classics · Ring Escape
- PiecesCanon in D · Für Elise · Ode to Joy · Rondo alla turca · Prelude in C · Hall of the Mountain King · and four more
- VoicesBells & mallets · Mallet ensemble · Glass harmonica · Warm strings · Arcade
No cheating
Every note you hear, you can watch happen.
Nothing is triggered off-screen to keep the music on time. If you hear it, a marble hit something.
The physics runs on a fixed timestep with a seeded random number generator, so pressing restart replays the performance identically, note for note. It is choreographed, and the app says it is choreographed.
Keep it
Record the whole thing.
Record a performance from the start in portrait, square or landscape, at 720p or 1080p, 30 or 60 fps. The video carries the synthesised audio straight from the graph — not a microphone.
There is a screenshot button, five colour palettes, and a clean view that hides every control. The file downloads to your machine and never passes through anything of ours.
- Shape9:16 portrait · 1:1 square · 16:9 landscape
- Size720p or 1080p, 30 or 60 fps
- PalettesNeon night · Aurora · Ember · Ice · Ink on night
- KeysSpace play · R restart · H controls · Esc clean view
Sources
Real scores, honestly sourced.
The music is public-domain classical, typeset from public-domain editions, arranged into excerpts and synthesised live in your browser. No commercial recordings, no unverified MIDI scraped off the internet.
An About & music sources panel in the app lists the edition and licence behind every piece, including the ones that need attribution. Two pieces were left out entirely because the only typesettings available were share-alike.
- WherePublic-domain editions, typeset and arranged
- SoundSynthesised live in your tab, no audio files
- BackendNone. Physics, synthesis and encoding all run on your machine
- AnalyticsNone, so we have no idea if anyone uses it
