Interact With Music

Music Neon Lamp is a physical music visualizer.
It has a big LED-pipe screen and each LED pipe is associated with a specific level in the Audio Spectrum and moves in real-time in relation to the music environment.

A mircophone is used as a input device to acquire the audio signal from the music/sound environment. After analyzing the wave date form the microphone in the processing application, the digital date is sent to the control circuit, which drives the LED screen displaying in real time.

LED-pipe Screen

I designed a PCB board with 16 LEDs as a display unit, which gave the freedom to extend the LED pipe into differnet lengths. This screen has 32 LED pipes and each pipe is composed by six display units. So, totally there are 16*6*32 = 3072 LEDs are soldered to the whole screen.

Electronics Stuff

I used Arduino as the controller. Since thousands of LEDs need to be controlled and the I/O ports of Arduino are not enough for all, I designed a driver circuit board using shift register chips, which can be controlled just by several I/O ports of Arduino.

Arduino and Processing are used for the hardware and software programming and I used the serial communication to exchange data beweeen them. In the processing program, I used the Ess r2 library to anaylze the input music/sound. Frequency and loundness are two main parameters in relation to the movement of the screen display.