I am planning to use PD for my living-room mood lighting (with the excellent Brilldea's LED Painter). One of the options I want (I already have programmed sequences and colors adapting to webcam input) is visualization of the music played.

Here's the problem: under specific orders from you-know-who I have to make the system respond to music, but in a rather subdued, not very dynamic fashion ("no disco lights!"). What do you think is the best approach? What method of sound analysis you consider to be the best in those circumstances?

I'll bonk~ some and then will play with fiddle~ ...

I agree that keeping the lights only somewhat synchronised with music might be difficult, but I do not think that it is all or nothing (i.e. either lights reflecting every beat or none at all). I hope that with proper thresholds and smoothing I will get a decent compromise...

One of my attempts... Please note that LEDs have lower color resolution and response will be probably lower as well, so there will be less flickering.

Any comments are welcome, including those concerning programming issues...

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/slowcolors.pd

looks great so far, though I didn't have time to properly dig in.

Only thing was ,I was expecting it to go red for the loud bits, which was why my mouth was watering when I put on mozarts requiem, killed the lights and poured some port into my glass.

in what library is [for++]?

sunji: I believe it's iemlib... That's what it says in the help file.

arif: I know your pain... In fact, that's how I did it the first time. However, it depends to a large extent on the music you play - if you relay only on the composite amplitude, you might find out that if you cover the whole spectrum (e.g. green is very quiet and red is very loud) you get various colors only in very dynamic pieces. Otherwise it is red all the time (or another color, if you shift the spectrum).

On the other hand, if you apply the spectrum to a section between the limits (i.e. green is moderately loud and red is very loud), the shifts might be much too drastic (i.e. "disco").

In other words, if you get the perfect setting for one piece of music, it is very likely that it will be messed up for another. Which gave me an excellent idea to use dynamic mins and maxes for each fragment (piece of music starting with longer silence? each play instance?), but it might be hard to pull off...

Argh, god damnit, your patch looked so beautifully simple, yet, when i fed it a simple sine tone, it would behave so unexpectedly and thus i wasn't able to turn it into the wonderful drawing tool I was hoping to achieve.

Keep the faith...

It's just one of the possibilities. I like it somewhat as it keeps changing and does reflect to a certain extent the pace of the music, without being too obtrusive.

Please note that I did want to avoid binding the light to the music too tightly, for the reasons stated above. This indirect connection seems to me more, I don't know, elegant?

Still, I will experiment more, also with more direct to amplitude rendering...

btw, may using alpha help with the flickering?

Flickering is mostly visible if the squares are beside one another - if they are spaced (as in my next example) this is not an issue. Of course, with LEDs it's even less so...

Here's another one, more to your liking, I suppose. Try out changing the line delay and the spectrum shift, so that it reflects your music properly.

Edit: the line parameter did not work properly...

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/slowcolors2.pd

Use of [average] is recommended for slow changes in parameters.

Hey Jabberwock,

I am diggin this man, I am doin a similar thing with particle sysmtems. I was wondering if you would allow me to use part of this patch in my next project I am working on. I have downloaded it and played around and I think it would fit quite nicely with what I am doing.
I still need to analyze the patch further and see what's going on exactly so I can change a few things to fit my music.

Think you coulod help me out if I had a few questions/

-Evan-

Sure, you can use it any way you want...

I will help if I can, be aware though that I have arrived at this solution more by trial and error than by understanding...

well i've dissected it completely.

It's a brilliant abstraction to have lying around