If you’ve ever been to a rave or a concert or almost any professionally organized music event, then you already know that visuals are a must. No matter how powerful a sound system, and how good the tracks that are coming out of it, music by itself just doesn’t do it anymore when it comes to larger audiences.

So why should your home be any different? For example, if you’re throwing a party and want to make people dance to the music you play, you shouldn’t think only about speaker quality, but also about the visual elements that you can add.

Now you don’t have to buy stroboscopic lights and lasers for home use (unless you want to give your guests severe headaches), but a decent-sized monitor or TV screen that's running an app like Luminant Music could just do the trick.

The program features several colorful audio reactive animations which are called “scenes”. You can sync these visuals with music from a playlist on your computer, from an online radio or even sounds that come through a microphone. This means that if you run the app on a laptop with a webcam (that implicitly has a microphone), you’ll most certainly be able to make the animations “dance” to the music coming out of your speakers.

Luminant Music is the type of app that I really want to like because it’s such a joyous music visualizer. And even though I appreciate the graphic design effort that went into creating each animation, I can’t help but notice that there’s no fundamental difference in style between the scenes. Don’t get me wrong, I love 3D animations that look like unicorns are vomiting rainbows into the Matrix, but not all music is candy-raving EDM that fits with happy, colorful visuals.

It would have been great if one could further customize the scenes with some darker tones, shadows, or maybe even a limited color palette. It also doesn’t help that there’s a noticeable fade between the scenes, which may ruin the vibe a bit, especially if you want to use these visuals in a very dark room. Still, it’s hard not to appreciate Luminant Music as an app with high-quality graphics that can be used to lighten up a party.