The Circular Wave effect fills your screen with glowing concentric rings, radiating lines, and spirals that pulse, distort, and spin in time with sound picked up by your microphone. It turns any screen into a music visualizer for a party, a stream overlay, or just something hypnotic to run in the background while music plays.
Before you start
- Microphone permission. Live reactivity needs your browser's microphone access. You'll be prompted the first time you enable it, and you can decline — the effect still runs, just without reacting to sound.
- A sound source your microphone can actually hear. This effect listens through the microphone, not a direct feed from your device's audio output. Music through speakers in the room works; music through headphones does not, because nothing reaches the mic.
- A browser with graphics acceleration turned on. This is a demanding 3D visualization, so it needs that setting enabled. If the screen stays blank, see Troubleshooting below.
Set it up
- Open the Circular Wave effect page.
- Select Enable Music Reactive in the top-left corner of the preview.
- Allow microphone access when your browser prompts you.
- Play music where the microphone can hear it — through room speakers, or your device's own speakers if you're not on headphones.
- Select Go Fullscreen for the full-screen visualization. Move your mouse to bring the controls back; press Escape to exit.
You'll know it worked when the button reads Music Reactive ON with a green Live badge next to it, and the rings visibly swell, distort, and shift color on louder passages and beats instead of drifting at a constant, gentle pace.
What each control does
| Control | Range | What it changes |
|---|---|---|
| Brightness | 10–100 | Shown in the Controls panel but has no effect on this particular effect. The wave's on-screen intensity follows the audio level and beat strength instead. |
| Color | color picker | Also shown in the Controls panel, also with no effect here. The wave stays a fixed bright green no matter what color you choose. |
This is a known limitation rather than something to work around — there's no slider or setting on this page that currently changes the wave's color or overall brightness. What does change it, second to second, is the music: bass, mid, and treble each tint a different part of the green base color as they rise, and a detected beat briefly brightens the whole visualization.
Common setups
- Party or gathering with a laptop as the visualizer. Put the screen somewhere guests can see it, play music through separate room speakers rather than right next to the microphone, and enable Music Reactive. Keeping some distance between the speaker and the mic keeps one frequency from drowning out the rest.
- Music playing from the same computer, no external speakers. Turn the volume up enough that the built-in microphone can hear its own speakers, then enable Music Reactive. If the sound is muted or routed to headphones, the visualizer has nothing to react to.
- Stream or recording overlay. Size the browser window to your overlay area, enable Music Reactive, and make sure your capture audio is playing out loud somewhere the microphone picks it up rather than only through a monitoring headset.
- Ambient background, no live audio. Skip enabling Music Reactive entirely. The wave still runs its slow default animation, which works fine as unattended, hands-off motion in a room.
Troubleshooting
The wave moves at a slow, constant pace no matter what's playing. Music Reactive isn't enabled, or the browser never got microphone permission. Select Enable Music Reactive and allow the prompt. If you already granted access once and it's still not reacting, check that your operating system hasn't muted or disconnected the microphone the browser is using.
I selected Enable Music Reactive and nothing happened — it never turns on. The browser denied microphone access, either just now or in an earlier visit. Open your browser's site settings for weblight.app (usually behind an icon in the address bar), set the microphone permission to allow, then reload the page and select the button again.
It doesn't react to music playing through my own speakers. Circular Wave listens through the microphone, not a direct audio feed from your device. Confirm the music is actually playing out loud and not routed to headphones, and that your system's default input is the microphone you expect, not a muted or disconnected one.
It only reacts to loud sounds and ignores quiet music. Very quiet input is deliberately dampened so background noise doesn't trigger false beats. Turn the music up, or move the microphone closer to the speaker.
The screen is blank — no wave, no color, nothing. Graphics acceleration is most likely off in your browser. Turn it on in your browser's settings and reload. If that's not an option on your device, Full Screen Light is a much simpler effect that works almost anywhere.
Moving Brightness or picking a new color in the Controls panel does nothing. That's expected right now — see "What each control does" above. Neither control is wired to this effect yet, so there's no setting to adjust to fix it.
Next steps
For a fuller party visualizer with a 3D disco ball and rainbow light beams, try Disco. For an audio-reactive effect you can also draw into with your cursor, see Interactive Light Painting.