Week One

Week One: Color Music

Brainstorming

During week one, the class as a whole was introduced to the major topics of this class and tasked with brainstorming project ideas. The topics including working at Cobb's Creek, Building Envelopes, and Artificial Lighting. Our group expressed interest in dynamic lighting which could be programmed to respond to sound waves. 

The Drexel Lighting Lab

All students who expressed interest in artificial lighting projects were taken to the DLux lab, located in Drexel One Plaza. The students were introduced to the different types of programmable LED lights. Finally, we decided on the projects each group was going to undertake. This group was gathered by the sole interest in LED lighting and sound.

The Proposed Design

During the first week, the group mostly dealt with further internal brainstorming for the outcomes of this project. When we first started, we had the general idea of finding the frequency of sound waves and matching up the certain frequencies up with a certain color. This was the basis for our project. From there on, it was all about the technical details of how this would be accomplished. The group met up with one of our advisers to discuss possible approaches to our design. We considered a few approaches:

1)  DMX or open DMX as the main interface, while looking into music and color analysis.
2) Utilizing a Spectrum Shield alongside an Arduino microcontroller that interfaced with LED lights, while also looking into color and music analysis.

We chose to work with the second approach. This approach seemed a bit more simplified in terms of setting up the device, allowing us more time to concentrate on programming the device to work more effectively towards what we would like it to do.