Wind Chimes
Free in-browser magic-mirror scene for kids — you explore it by moving in front of the camera. No install, no account.
▶ Play now — it's freeBest on a laptop or tablet with a webcam · nothing is recorded
What is Wind Chimes?
A rack of long metal chimes hangs from a wooden beam across the top of the screen, with you faintly visible behind them. Sweep a hand — or an elbow, or your whole body — through a chime and it swings on its cord and rings, then keeps swaying long after the note has faded, exactly like a real wind chime in a breeze. Every chime is a different note of a five-note scale, which is the trick that makes this work for any age: there is no wrong note to hit, so a toddler batting at them and a six-year-old playing careful runs both sound good. Brush across several chimes in one movement and you get a whole run, rising if you sweep right and falling if you sweep left, and a harder sweep swings the chime further and rings it louder. Each chime shows its note letter, so it quietly doubles as a first look at a musical scale. Press SPACE to hang a new tuning — sunrise, moonlight or meadow — each with its own colors. There is no score, no timer and no way to lose; it is a toy you leave running. VIVID mode hangs eight chimes instead of six, lets them ring longer, and adds drifting sparks of light.
How to play Wind Chimes
- Press Play now and allow the camera when the browser asks. Nothing installs.
- Get in range. The chimes hang from a beam at the top and reach about two thirds of the way down, so it is the top and middle of the frame that plays — a child sitting at a desk with hands up is already in it. Sit back far enough that a whole arm sweep fits in the picture.
- Sweep a whole hand, a forearm or an elbow across a chime. It is tuned for something hand-sized and moving, and holding still against a chime does nothing at all: it answers something crossing it, not something touching it.
- Sweep right for a rising run and left for a falling one. The long chimes on the left are the low notes and the short ones on the right the high ones, laid out like a xylophone.
- SPACE hangs a different tuning. M turns the sound on and off — worth pressing if the chimes swing silently, because that mute is shared across the site and remembered from your last visit.
If you cannot make out the room at all behind the chimes, the camera never started. The camera help page tests it in one click.
What you are actually playing
Each chime is one note of a five-note scale, chosen so that no two of them clash. That is why it works for a two-year-old and a ten-year-old at once: there is no wrong chime available, so batting at them at random still sounds like music.
The lowest chime is middle C. Every tube carries its note letter near the bottom, and the letter floats up again for a moment each time you ring it, so a child hears the note and sees its name together.
SPACE hangs a different tuning. There are three, and each recolors the whole scene as well as retuning it:
- Sunrise. C D E G A C — the bright major five, the nursery-xylophone one. Warm amber.
- Moonlight. C Eb F G Bb C — the same idea turned minor, the scale most blues is built on. Deep blue.
- Meadow. C D F G Bb C — open and unsettled, neither happy nor sad. Green.
Vivid hangs eight chimes instead of six, and the three extra at the right-hand end repeat the first three letters an octave higher, so a full Vivid sweep is the same shape twice, once low and once high. Press SPACE while notes are still sounding and the ones already ringing finish in the old tuning while the rack changes color underneath them.
What makes a chime ring, and how loud
Not speed. A hand crawling across and a hand whipping across both ring every chime they pass through — the range was checked at speeds nearly nine times apart, and neither end misses. What a harder sweep changes is the volume.
- More of you means more noise. A whole forearm rather than the edge of a hand rings louder, throws the chime further out on its cord and makes the note last longer. Most deliberate sweeps land near full strength, so only real grazes come out quiet.
- Notes are short. In the six-chime rack a firm strike rings for roughly two and a half seconds and a graze for under two. Vivid stretches both, to about three and a half and a little over two.
- The chime goes the way your hand went, so a sweep leaves the rack leaning that way. Reach straight in head-on and it picks a side for itself.
- The same chime will not ring twice inside about half a second. You cannot make one chatter by holding a hand over it, and a run has to keep moving to keep sounding.
- Eight tones at once is the ceiling, and each strike spends one on the note plus a shorter one on its metallic edge. Sweep the whole rack in a single fast movement and the last chime or two may swing without sounding.
Nothing rings on its own. An empty room, or a grainy picture in poor light, leaves the rack completely silent.
Ways to play it
- A run up and back. One unbroken sweep right, then one back left. Rising, then falling.
- One chime, then wait. Ring a single tube and watch what happens after the sound stops. The note fades in a couple of seconds but the swing does not: it takes about four seconds to halve, and the long chimes on the left need roughly one and three quarter seconds per swing out and back while the short ones twitch far quicker.
- Two children at once. Each chime is watched on its own, so two people at opposite ends of the rack ring different notes at the same time without getting in each other's way.
- Read the letters. Ring one tube at a time and say its letter out loud. The flats are spelled Eb and Bb, the way a xylophone spells them. In Vivid, find the two tubes showing the same letter and hear the same note twice over.
What a grown-up should know
It does not finish. Nothing is counted and no round is in progress, so the rack can be stopped at any moment without interrupting anything.
It is the only sound. This scene has no backing music at all, unusually for this site, so what you hear is chimes and nothing else. Each note dies away within a few seconds, so even two children hammering at it never builds into a wall of noise. M silences it; that switch carries across the whole site and is remembered, which is also why a rack can start out silent.
It needs arm room, not floor room. A chair pushed back from a laptop is enough, and there is a clear strip down each side of the picture where no chime hangs, so nobody has to reach to the very edge of frame.
From about three. Nothing to read but single letters and nothing to aim at precisely. Younger children swipe; older ones use the letters and invent runs.
Two things that look like faults and are not: the room behind the chimes is dimmed heavily on purpose, because thin tubes over a bright room are unreadable; and on a device set to reduce motion, Vivid drops its drifting specks of light.