- published: 19 Jul 2014
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The bouncing ball is a device used in video recordings to visually indicate the rhythm of a song, helping audiences to sing along with live or prerecorded music. As the song's lyrics are displayed on the screen, an animated ball bounces across the top of the words, landing on each syllable when it is to be sung.
The bouncing ball was invented at Fleischer Studios for the Song Car-Tunes series of animated cartoons (both Max and Dave Fleischer later claimed to have devised the idea). It was introduced in September 1925 with the film My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. In these earliest films using the device, the bouncing ball itself was not animated. The effect was created by filming a long stick with a luminescent ball on the tip, which was physically "bounced" across a screen of printed words by a studio employee. The movement was captured on high-contrast film that rendered the stick invisible. The ball would usually appear as white-on-black, though sometimes the ball and lyrics would be superimposed over (darkened) still drawings or photographs. Later versions of the bouncing ball have used cel animation or digital effects. Some modern video editing programs achieve the same effect as the bouncing ball by highlighting each displayed syllable as it is sung.