Kinetic Light: LED Assignments ——Eric Parren (Skye Gao)

LED Light Assignment 1: Light with Music

For this project, I wanted to sync color changes on the Analog RGB strip with music pieces. Instead of programmed the changes of colors to a settled music, I wanted composition can be applied to any music pieces. So I used a sound sensor to receive sound values and controlled color changes by setting ranges to the received values. Circuit is shown as below:

One main challenge I met was to set the range for sound signals. Since the sound sensor is very sensitive and can only identify the volume, the value it receives depends very much on the environment. Therefore, I need to change the coding each time I play the composition. As a consequence, the color displayed is very random and I can not control the speed precisely. Here is a demo for a random song test:

However, the outcome can be quite nice is the music is fast-tempoed. This is the demo for presentation:

The feedbacks I got from presentation were related to the issues I met during the process: The color change was too random and not precisely synced to the music. But I also got suggestion that, with processing, I can actually analyze the frequency of the music and sync it to the color change, which will make the composition more harmonious.  

LED Light Assignment 2: Music light show “Ambush from Ten Sides”

Partners: Candy, Louis

For this project, we made a 2-min composition using RGB LED Strip synchronized with music. The music pieces we chose was “Ambush from Ten Sides”, which is a classical piece of Chinese lute music about a battle between the Chu and Han armies, set in 202 BC. We took reference from an instrumental performance on youtube and edited the music by ourselves.  It consists of four chapters of the original composition: Ambush, Initial Battle, Final battle, and tight encirclement. The reference  from Youtube: 

The way color was displayed was inspired by one of our in-class assignment using the Fade-candy library, which processing will read the color pixels on images and shows them on led strip.

We used images online/dots we drew by ourselves, and let the led strip reveal the color on the image. It took some time to sync the image color to the music content. Image shown as below:

We later added a storyboard for the audience to better understand the cone ten of the music pieces. And this is the presentation demo in class:

Leave a Reply