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 love this! I've been wanting to get my hands into some of this

Beat detection - tempo - often suggests mood in music

Bass energy - is another good one to suggest mood in music

Dont have it respond to the overall amplitude - because whatever you listen to, it's always going to change, a lot.

The thing with the intelligent lighting is, you want it to put on party disco lights when it recognizes you're listening to party disco, and subtle calmer stuff when your listening to your favourite aria.

the maxlib set of eternals will have objects like [chord]' [beat], [rhythm].

Thank you for your suggestions!

arif: Mood change on tempo sounds like a very good idea! For example, with faster pieces shift the colors toward red, with slower toward green...

Bass energy - could you give any examples? I am not sure how to determine that...

As for the disco lights in party music, I still would rather avoid it. Not only because she says so, but, remember, this is living-room lighting - I still want to sip coffee and chat with my friends, no matter what music is on. Aggressive lighting might be too distracting!

sunji: the externals look good, but they seem to work only with MIDI. Is there a way to convert real-time music to midi in Pure Data?

by bass energy, I mean dynamism in the lower frequencies. A classical recording may contain bass frequencies, but they won't be pumping in amplitude like the latest song by Justice or [insert dance act here]

Unless you're keen on having the lighting respond unbiasedly to the music played (as in, prepared to pump when you have energetic music coming through), then as far as I can see, you may as well just create a nice algorithm that nicely changes the lighting scheme in a way that is pretty to the eye, but has no relevance to the music.

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