This week I worked to finalize all of the technical aspects of my music visualizer. My original plan was to use an audio jack to input music to the Arduino. After implementing the circuitry and trying to write the software I couldn’t figure out how to process the signal at the analog input of the Arduino. With more time and some more research I could have eventually figured it out, but wanted to take a safer approach to guarantee I had a working project. Instead of input from an audio jack, I decided to use an input from my computer.
With audio coming from the computer, the computer can be used to process the audio before sending it to the Arduino. I did this using the program Processing and some open source code. The hardest part about this was that the minim library for Processing takes in whatever the default recording device is on the computer as its audio input line. Windows computer used to have something called stereo mix, but it has been removed with Windows 10. It took me a while to figure out a fix for this, but eventually found a program that acts as a virtual aux cord and connects the computer’s output device (the speakers) to the computer’s audio input. With this program I was able to use the processing software and implement a functioning music visualizer with a strip of LEDs. The working technical part can be seen in the video below.
The next step for the upcoming week is just building a finished design. For this design, I want to build a sculpture that looks like an audio signal and can be hung on a wall. A sketch of the design can be seen below.
