Scott's work is amazing.
Another related project that builds on a similar foundation: https://github.com/ledfx/ledfx
Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
21–30 of 76 posts
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#22Woow, this was my first hardware project right around the time it released! I remember stapling a bunch of LED strips around our common room and creating a case for the pi + power supply by drilling a bunch of ventilation + cable holes in a wooden box.
And of course, by the time I got it to work perfectly I never looked at it again. As is tradition.
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#23how is it hard, do a A to D, add a filter, do compute, then do D to A.
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#24how is it hard, do a A to D, add a filter, do compute, then do D to A.
The article covers that.
In short, audio and visual perception do not map perfectly. Humans don't have a linear perception of either so a perfect A to D then D to A conversion yields unsatisfying results.
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#25I like this writeup but I feel like the title doesn't really tell you what it's about ... to me it's about creativity within constraints.
The author finds, as many do, that naive or first-approximation approaches fail within certain constraints and that more complex methods are necessary to achieve simplicity. He finds, as I have, that perceptual and spectral domains are a better space to work in for things that are perceptual and spectral than in the raw data.
What I don't see him get to (might be the next blog post, IDK), is getting into constraints in the use of color - everything is in 'rainbow town' as we say, and it's there that things get chewy.
I'm personally not a fan of emissive green LED light in social spaces. I think it looks terrible and makes people look terrible. Just a personal thing, but putting it into practice with these sorts of systems is challenging as it results in spectral discontinuities and immediately requires the use of more sophisticated color systems.
I'm also about maximum restraint in these systems - if they have flashy tricks, I feel they should do them very very rarely and instead have durational and/or stochastic behavior that keeps a lot in reserve and rewards closer inspection.
I put all this stuff into practice in a permanent audio-reactive LED installation at a food hall/ nightclub in Boulder: https://hardwork.party/rosetta-hall-2019/
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#26how is it hard, do a A to D, add a filter, do compute, then do D to A.
Not hard to do, hard to do well. Hiding all complexity with a hand wavey “do compute” doesn’t make that bit easy
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#27Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#28Thanks for this! Exactly the thing I'm struggling with now. Making decent visualisation for music based on ESP32-S3.
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#29I like this writeup but I feel like the title doesn't really tell you what it's about ... to me it's about creativity within constraints. The author finds, as many do, that naive or first-approximation approaches fail within certain constraints and that more complex methods are necessary to achieve simplicity. He finds, as I have, that perceptual and spectral domains are a better space to work in for things that are…
Yeah, "diabolical" overstates it. It isn't a wicked problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Kinda funny but I am a fan of green LED light to supplement natural light on hot summer days. I can feel the radiant heat from LED lights on my bare skin and since the human eye is most sensitive to green light I feel the most comfortable with my LED strip set to (0,255,0)
Re: Audio Reactive LED Strips Are Diabolically Hard
#30I like this writeup but I feel like the title doesn't really tell you what it's about ... to me it's about creativity within constraints. The author finds, as many do, that naive or first-approximation approaches fail within certain constraints and that more complex methods are necessary to achieve simplicity. He finds, as I have, that perceptual and spectral domains are a better space to work in for things that are…
I didn't go into much detail about it but there's a whole rabbit hole of color theory and color models. For example, the spectrum effect assigns different colors to different frequency bins, but also adjusts the assignment over time to avoid a static looking effect. It does this by rotating a "color angle" kind of like the HSL model.
I really like your LED installation in Rosetta Hall, it looks beautiful!