My project has come a long way in only a couple weeks. For starters, I’ve switched from using the LED strip to an LED matrix:
This has opened up so many more possibilities in terms of how I can display the visualization. My current design uses circular “blips” that increase and decrease in intensity to the beat and move around the matrix. It works pretty well. I’ve also managed to get the signal processing to be much more accurate, so now I can pick out individual notes and instruments with some degree of accuracy. This means that certain properties of the visualization, like the intensity of a blip or the rotation of the image can be easily mapped to the current volume of a note or the energy of an instrument. This mapping is manual, so I’ve decided to only make my visualization work for a specific song.
Here’s my very poorly recorded demo of what I have so far. Again, you can’t actually hear the song in the video, so I had to use YouTube Doubler again. You might have to refresh a few times to get the videos to sync up. I really need to get some kind of video editor…
Right now the visualization only runs for the first part of the song, but extending it to map to other parts of the song shouldn’t be too much work. I guess my to-do list right now includes:
- Deciding whether I want a bigger display or not
- Finding some material to create a cover for the LEDs (still too damn bright)
- Finishing the visualization for the rest of the song