Gravity

Quick Start

Zero to orbit in under a minute:

1. Load Gravity on an instrument track (or launch the standalone — it opens full-screen, as nature intended).
2. Pick a preset. Slow Orbits is a gentle first world.
3. Press PLAY — or run your DAW's transport; the host always wins.
4. Fling an orb. Grab it, drag, let go. The throw becomes its velocity.
5. Drag the gravity well — the circle near the middle. Move it and every orbit in the room bends.
6. Set Pulse to 2 bars on the top bar. Now the well inhales in time, and chaos starts keeping a schedule.

The Machine

Top bar

Play/Stop, tempo (60–240), the INSTRUMENT | SCALE view switch, World (the global tuning system), Pulse, Presets, Silent Mode, Hide Panels, Settings. Under a host, Play/Stop and tempo show the host's transport and dim to a read-only display — the host owns them, and Gravity is already following.

Left rail

Orb enables, Octave (−2…+2), Key Range, Quantize, Orb Collisions, Plane Shape, and a Reset Orbs button at the bottom for when the experiment escapes.

The plane

The arena. Everything alive lives here.

Right panel

Four tabs: PHYSICS · SOUND · VISUALS · MIDI.

Scale strip

The key-change timeline, always running along the bottom. Tap SCALE up top for the full-screen editor.

Hide Panels collapses everything but the plane — the correct mode for touch screens and stages. F11 (or Ctrl+Cmd+F) goes fullscreen in standalone.

The Plane

Grab an orb and it follows your finger; release and it flies. Grab the gravity well and drag it anywhere — stronger well, tighter orbits.

When an orb strikes a wall, the wall flashes in that orb's colour and plays a note. Where it hits is what it plays: each impact point along the boundary maps to a note of the current scale, low at one end, high at the other. Middle of a wall, middle of the scale. Corners get dramatic.

Eight worlds to bounce in

The boundary doesn't have to be a box. The Plane Shape selector offers Rectangle · Circle · Triangle · Hexagon · Pentagon · Octagon · Diamond · Star, and each one plays differently:

• Rectangle — the classic. Each of the four walls spans the whole scale on its own.
• Every other shape — pitch walks once around the entire perimeter, clockwise from the top. A circle sweeps pitch like a clock face; a star winds in and out through the spikes.
• Sharp corners (triangle, diamond, star) ricochet hard and play jagged. Round-ish shapes (circle, octagon) glide and play smooth.

Switch shapes mid-performance — orbs get scooped back inside automatically, and the shape saves with the preset.

Orb Collisions

Toggle on the left rail. When on, orbs colliding with each other also play — a note split between the two orbs' last wall notes, snapped to scale. Cheap harmony, occasionally profound.

Physics

The PHYSICS tab. This is where the feel of the universe lives.

Pulse (top bar: Off / 1 / 2 / 4 / 8 bars) makes the well surge on a bar-locked schedule. It is the closest thing Gravity has to a metronome — if a patch feels arrhythmic, turn it on before touching anything else.

Sound

The SOUND tab. One shared plucked-string voice plays all four orbs polyphonically — four hands, one instrument.

The instrument (global)

Brightness

Dark and woody → bright and glassy.

Decay

Short pluck → piano-length ring-out.

Warmth

Metallic and nasal → dark and mellow.

Stiffness

Zero is an ideal string; raise it and the overtones bend upward into piano-like inharmonicity.

Body

How much wooden-box resonance sits under the string.

The reverb (global)

Size × Mix

Closet → cathedral, dry → drowned.

Damp × Width

Bright glassy tails vs dark plates; mono → full stereo.

Per orb

Pick an orb with the selector, then:

Pitch / Volume

Pitch (±24 semitones) and Volume — one XY pad.

Quantize

Global · None · 1/32 … 1/2. A collision either sounds instantly (None) or waits for the next grid line. Mix per-orb values for instant polyrhythm — one orb on 1/4, one on 1/16, one feral.

Mass

Global/Custom toggle, for one deliberately heavy planet.

Scales, Keys & Other Worlds

Everything Gravity plays is snapped to scale. There are no wrong notes, only surprising ones.

The scale timeline

The strip along the bottom is a chain of segments — each one a root + scale + bar count (1–16 bars, up to 16 segments). The playhead sweeps; when it enters a new segment, the whole instrument re-harmonises, locked to the transport. One segment = a static key. Four segments = a chord progression your orbs play through without being told.

• Tap a segment to edit root / scale / bars; ADD and DEL in the header; drag an edge to resize.
• Tap individual keys on a segment's keyboard to sculpt a custom scale, note by note. A * marks your mutations (C Maj*). Tap any preset root/scale to revert.
• The SCALE view (top bar) is the same thing full-screen, with a circle of fifths, orb-coloured activity dots, and a live output monitor showing what's actually sounding.

16 scales ship, from Major to Whole Tone to both Diminisheds, plus Key Range (left rail: 6–48 semitones) controlling how much of the scale a wall spans — small range hugs the tonic, big range leaps.

Other tuning worlds

The World selector (top bar) sets the global intonation — not which notes, but where the notes actually are. Eleven systems: Western 12-TET, Pythagorean, Just Intonation, Arabic 12-tone and 24-tone maqam, Turkish 53-comma makam, Indian raga and 22-shruti, Persian dastgah, Chinese pentatonic and 12-lü. Pick a non-Western world and the SCALE view becomes a tuning wheel with the system's pitches at their true positions; the internal voice plays them exactly, and MIDI out carries them as per-channel pitch bend so your external synths follow.

If your DAW or the TouchMachines Liveset pushes a global key, Gravity obeys and shows FOLLOWING HOST KEY — the scale surfaces go read-only until the host lets go.

MIDI Out

Every orb is also a MIDI instrument. Per orb, on the MIDI tab:

Channel / Notes

Channel (1–16; defaults 1/2/3/4) and Notes On/Off — each orb can drive its own synth, or all four can gang up on one piano.

CC Out

The orb's X and Y position stream as two CCs (defaults 16/17). An orb drifting in low gravity is the most organic modulation source you own.

SOLO (per CC axis)

Mutes every other CC Gravity sends so you can MIDI-learn one axis cleanly: solo, wiggle, map, next. Notes are never affected, and solo isn't saved — it's a mapping tool, not a performance state.

Routing ideas: four channels → one poly synth (the four-handed pianist), four channels → four synths (a physics-driven ensemble), or notes off + CC on (the orb becomes a slow expression pedal).

SILENT — Gravity as a pure modulator

SILENT MODE (top bar, next to Hide Panels) switches off Gravity's own audio engine. Everything else keeps running exactly as before: the orbs fall and collide, the MIDI goes out, the OSC goes out, the plane still flashes on every hit. You just don't hear Gravity — you hear whatever it is driving.

While it's armed the button breathes — a slow cyan swell. Silence is the one state that gives you no audible confirmation, so the lamp keeps saying it: if Gravity has gone quiet and you can't remember why, look for the pulsing button.

Use it when Gravity is the player, not the instrument: four orbs driving four synths, or an orb's X/Y steering a video rig over OSC. It also costs almost nothing on the CPU with the engine bypassed, so you can run several instances as modulators without paying for pluck voices nobody listens to.

Two things worth knowing:

• Silent Mode is not part of a preset. It belongs to this instance, not to a sound, so loading a preset — including one you built for MIDI-only use — never silences a Gravity that was making noise, and never un-silences one that wasn't. It is remembered with your session.
• The SOUND tab stays open, half-lit. The instrument and reverb pads dim out (they're switched off), but the orb selector, Orb Dynamics and Quantize stay live — because those still shape what goes down the wire. Pitch transposes the note you send, Volume becomes its MIDI velocity, and Quantize still snaps its timing. In Silent Mode that half of the tab is your modulator's control panel.

Gesture Control

Gravity listens for MIDI CC gestures, so a wiimote — or anything that can send CC — can play it from across the room:

Touch always overrides gesture — the screen wins arguments.

Presets, Themes & Settings

The preset slot sits on the top bar: 005 DEEP WELL, with a stepper on either side. The steppers walk to the previous or next sound in one tap — the number is that sound's place in the running order, not a name tag. Tap the name and the drawer slides in from the left without stopping the music: scroll it, tap a row to load, + SAVE, make folders, rename, delete, or drag rows to reorganise. Folder order is step order, so arranging the drawer is arranging your set list. A preset captures the whole world — parameters, progression, theme, and the exact positions and velocities of the orbs and well.

Six factory worlds: Init (blank lab), Slow Orbits (perpetual smooth motion), Jade Pond (heavy, sticky, pentatonic), Pendulum Bells (bright and bouncy), Deep Well (dark inward spiral), Scatter (roaming and collision-happy).

Settings holds eight colour themes (all colour-vision-safe — the four orb colours stay tellable-apart in every one), full custom colours, and licensing. Gravity comes with a 14-day free trial — every feature, no payment details, just an email address to start it. The pill on the top bar starts it, then counts it down. Before you start it, and after it ends, the demo politely goes quiet at intervals until you feed it a license.

The VISUALS tab controls the eye candy: motion trails (length × opacity), collision particles, and the glowing sphere's bloom and intensity. All cosmetic, all worth it — and the first things to turn down if CPU complains.

Recipes

Field Notes

• Start from a preset, not Init. The parameter space is a wilderness; presets are the marked trails.
• Low gravity + low damping = evolution. High + high = rhythm. Everything else is in between.
• Nothing playing? Check orb enables, per-orb volume, and that a transport is actually running. Expecting external MIDI? Notes On.
• Orbs moving and hitting, but silent? Look at Silent Mode in the top bar — if it's lit and slowly breathing, the audio engine is off on purpose and Gravity is running as a MIDI/OSC modulator. That's also why the top half of the SOUND tab is dimmed.
• Transport looks stuck on STOP in your DAW? It isn't. Under a host those buttons are a dimmed read-only display of the host's transport; Gravity follows the host's tempo and position whatever the buttons look like.
• Physics gone strange? Reset Orbs, bottom of the left rail. No shame in it.
• Orbits spiralling into a doom-pile at the centre? Lower the well strength. It's always the well.
• Collisions feel sloppy? Raise Quantize, or raise Damping so orbs settle instead of micro-bouncing.
• CPU hot? Particles off, Glow down. The universe is expensive.
• Orb-orb collisions silent? The toggle is off — or both orbs haven't hit a wall yet, and there's nothing to harmonise.