How to make particles react to music?

[lazyroll]

Is there a way to animate particular particles/layer settings to react to the dynamics of the audio? Example:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9P_qUn ... hillNation[/youtube]

[slowtiger]

None of the settings inside the particle layer is animateable, unfortunately. But you could do something with the particle layer itself: scale and translate. And these movements could be controlled by a bone wiggle.

The rhythm in your example was achieved in post, I think: just render a longer clip of that particle stuff, then in a video editor cut it in pieces and change the speed of every second of them (or use a time ramp).

[Greenlaw]

Is there a way to animate particular particles/layer settings to react to the dynamics of the audio?

As slowtiger noted, you can use audio to animate a bone in Moho, and that bone can be used to drive a Smart Bone Action. Unfortunately, the parameters in Moho's particle system are not keyframeable so this limits what you can control with the Smart Bone Action.

You can use the Smart Bone to control things like transforming the emitter's position (x,y, and z), rotation, and size--pretty much anything you can normally do with a layer--or to drive bones that the emitter is attached to. Just now I played around with this for a few minutes and already see some interesting possibilities, notably with z-depth. If you want to get extra clever with this, split out different frequency ranges of your audio as separate audio files, and then use them to drive different Smart Bones. For example, maybe use the low-end version to drive scale, mid- for y, and hi- for x. You should be able to do this using any audio editor, including free ones like Audacity.

Hope this gives you some ideas.

[lazyroll]

Thank you, guys! Especially for the tip about the frequency split. Hopefully, I'll manage to come up with something.

[slowtiger]

Funny that we basically still use the same tricks like in 1970's light organs.