Week Four

Week Four: Color Music

Color and Sound Frequencies

Sound    ||   Frequency

C4            50Hz

C10        10KHz

Light    ||   Frequency

405THz       790THz

Light Color    ||   Frequency Range

   Red             405 -- 480

   Orange          480 -- 510

   Yellow          510 -- 530

   Green           530 -- 580

  Cyan            580 -- 600

   Blue            600 -- 700

   Violet          700 -- 790

           in order to change the color of LED lights, the team intends to link light and sound frequencies(listed above). The team intends to write code (in the ArduinoIDE) that will link the frequency ranges of sound (listed above) to the frequency ranges of the various colors of light, disregarding the la

Additional Ideas for the Project

Currently, the Arduino and Spectrum Shield have yet to be received. It arrived on Drexel on Thursday, May 1st but due to University policy, we cannot retrieve it until it has been processed. In the mean time, speculation of where the direction of this project will go has been given some thought.

At this point in time we have two main ideas for how to approach this project. The first idea is to use the spectrum shield to filter the audio signal into multiple bandwidths, and then use the data from this to drive the LEDs. This particular idea would work most effectively if we found some sort of correlation between genres of music and their associated moods. The main issue with this approach is that if this prototype was connected to a single instrument playing within one or two octaves, there would be almost no variation in color with the LEDs.

The other idea is to relate each note in an octave to a different color. This could be achieved by running a MATLAB script which would basically function as a tuner and determine individual notes from an audio signal. In this mode we would most likely drive several LEDs so that each one will be a different color. Alternatively, we could use a MIDI keyboard as the input rather than ambient sound. The MIDI keyboard sends a data to a computer containing the particular key which was struck (note) and the velocity with which it was pressed. Using this data we could easily relate a color to each note, and in addition we could relate the velocity of the key to the intensity of the light produced.