The effects gallery got a soundtrack

The effects gallery has always been the part of this site you can just watch — thirteen particle scenes in free play, with load, speed and scale knobs and no score attached. As of today it also sounds like something.

Every scene now has its own music: thirty original instrumental tracks across the thirteen scenes, at least two takes each, written to match what’s on screen. The neon city gets restrained synthwave whose loop locks to the camera’s 25-second flight. The supernova gets a piece built from 7.5-second phrases, because that’s exactly how often the star detonates — every collapse lands on a downbeat. The snow gets a music box, the mercury blobs get a late-night Rhodes, the galaxy gets strings with room to breathe. None of it demands attention. All of it has an actual tune.

How to turn it on

Open any scene in the gallery and look at the control strip: there’s a ♪ button and a volume slider next to the knobs that were already there. Tap ♪ once and that scene’s soundtrack starts, looping, at a background level. The choice is remembered on your device, so next time a scene opens playing.

Two takes exist for every scene (the nebula got six), and the player picks one at random each time — so reopening a scene doesn’t wear the same groove.

Use it as a screensaver

This is the use we had in mind. Pick a scene, turn the music on, set the load to whatever your machine holds gracefully, and hit fullscreen. The scenes run indefinitely, the tracks loop without a seam, and nothing builds to a climax or suddenly gets loud — they’re written to still be pleasant in minute thirty. The Galaxy Spiral with the strings, or Nebula Drift with the slow synth line, will happily hold a wall for an evening.

A practical note for laptops: the scenes are real GPU load, and more load means more fan. The load knob is right there — a screensaver doesn’t need your machine’s maximum.

Why the benchmark stays silent

The performance test runs the same scenes and gets no music, on purpose. It measures 95th-percentile frame times, and audio is a small but real source of exactly the scheduling jitter that statistic exists to catch — and it wouldn’t be the same load for someone running muted. A score has to mean the same thing on every machine, so the scored run stays silent and the gallery gets the concert. The full reasoning is in how the score works.

Everything is free, in the browser, no account. The tracks stream only when you turn them on — if you never touch ♪, the gallery loads exactly as many bytes as it did last week. Full release notes are in the changelog.