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?

Greetings,

I am looking for Open DMX USB interface for Windows. It seems that there was one some time ago, but all links are dead...

Thanks for any help!

I am having a very basic problem with GEM in pd (probably because I have started yesterday...).

I have a patch which manipulates input from my webcam and displays it as several (sixteen, to be exact) squares. I have separated the sqaure display into an abstraction, as it will be later substituted with DMX communication.

To the abstraction I send the square number (from which the position of the square is calculated in the abstraction) and the RGB numbers. I call the abstration from a for++ loop...

Everything works fine, the squares appear in correct places and with correct colors. However, the problem is, that each of them disappears when the next one is drawn!

How to correct that?

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...

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

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...

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...

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

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...

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?

Thanks for the tips, I did it with [repeat] and [separator] objects. Works like a charm! Thanks again!

Here they are:

and

They are somewhat ugly, as I said, I'm just starting...

Of course, I will be grateful for any critique or tips (e.g. I did not figure out how to use arrays of constants - they do not allow me to save them...).