Visualizing Music With LEDs And Lasers

If youve been reading this blog, you probably know about the Humboldt Laser Harp project (HLH). Todays blog post is closely connected to the HLH, and addresses the general topic of ways to visualize music with LEDs and lasers.

John Van Duzer Theatre

The HLH is the first foray for the Humboldt Microcontrollers (MCUs) Group into connecting music with light. Nick A has done a little music-into-light on his own, but the HLH will be the first collaborative group project for this type of application. It will be fun to see where the HLH leads. If we can involve some of the fabulous Humboldt musicians with our projects to visualize music with LEDs and lasers, including some of the Humbodt State University students and instructors, the skys the limit. Maybe in a couple years there will be a Humboldt Electronic Light Orchestra performance at the Van Duzer!

Laserium

My first experience with music and lasers was a Laserium laser light show in Seattle -- it was an impressive and immersive experience that I really enjoyed. That was many years ago and musical-light technology has come a long way since then. At this point the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group isnt trying to replicate or out-do the Laserium experience or compete with existing advanced lighting technology in the music world. As far as I know we dont have people in the group (yet) who have the knowledge and interest to design and build top of the line music light show equipment, or the funding to buy the components. But it will be fun to see what MCU-based instruments and systems we build or experiment with. It will be fun if we can get some people in the group whose main passion related to MCUs is in the area of music or music-into-light.

Echo Rises 800+ LED music-into-light system

The Hack A Day post "800+ LED Wall With Diffuser Panel is a Work of Art" was the catalyst for todays blog post. It shows a music-into-light system from Echo Rises. If you watch the video in this post closely, youll see its title or subtitle is How To Visualize Music Using LEDs. For the Humboldt Electronic Light Orchestra, Id like to extend that theme to include lasers. The Hack A Day post gives this overview of the Echo Rises system controlled by a Teensy MCU:

"What happens when you take over 800 individually addressable super bright RGB LEDs and house them in a giant diffused panel? You get awesome...[Epoch Rises] is a small electronic music and interactive technology duo who create cool interactive projects...for their live shows and performances. They love their WS2812B LEDs...it can take any video input, it can be controlled by sound or music, an iPad, or even generate random imagery by itself. The 800 LEDs are controlled by a Teensy 3.0 using the OctoWS2811 library...which is capable of driving over 1000 LEDs at a whopping 30FPS using just one Teensy microcontroller."

Noomis

Whoa!! Wouldnt that be fun, controlling 800 - 1000 LEDs with one tiny Teensy MCU. If we had one or two systems like that, and combined them with the HLH and Jonathan Sparks Noomis electronic musical instrument, wed have a pretty good reason for serious and innovative musicians to collaborate with the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group.

Hack A Day also did an interview with Paul Stoffregen, the creator of the Teensy, talking about his latest version, the Teensy 3.1. You can buy the Teensy 3.1 direct from Pauls website, or from the regular places like SparkFun. I dont know of anyone whos used the Teensy, but I foresee that happening in Humboldt before too much longer.

Teensy 3.1

If you think it would be interesting, challenging and fun to help create eight or ten unique Humboldt music-to-light different but complementary systems that would form the nucleus of an awesome performance, show up tomorrow, July 23, for the next meeting of the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group. At the meeting well talk a little about the Humboldt Laser Harp, and also review Serial Peripheral Interface, the subject of Jeremy Blums #8 Arduino video tutorial. See you from 6 - 8 PM at 1385 8th Street, Arcata, California, USA.

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Electric Waste Orchestra Humboldt Electronic Light Orchestra

So a couple days ago I read about the Electric Waste Orchestra (EWO) in PSFK. It seemed like an idea that is harmoniously complementary to the Humboldt Electronic Light Orchestra were working to kickstart with the Humboldt Laser Harp project. Then today I met Tibora Girczyc-Blum, the director of SCRAP Humboldt, and I realized how well the EWO concept meshes with the SCRAP Humboldt mission. Per PSFK:

Electric Waste Orchestra hard drive instrument

"The Electric Waste Orchestra at Makerspace Urbana, located in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, takes outdated technology and turns them into pieces of fully functioning musical equipment. One guitar, shown in the video above, is comprised of an old keyboard number pad, six hard-drives, Arduino hardware and some software, all of which will not decay into toxic waste. They have other musical hardware in the works, including a Wiimote, and yes, they can all create beautiful music. The electric orchestra is a clever way to bring new life to these old technologies...It’s nice to see people taking these old gadgets out of the dumpsters

Arduino controlling the hard drive instrument

and onto the stage to bring others joy..."

Here is a YouTube list of the EWO videos. It looks like theyre in the early stages of learning to play somewhat traditional music with their Aduino-controlled instruments. However, some of the music played in the video embedded in the PSFK article seems closer to circuit bending than to traditional music. If youre not familiar with circuit bending, Wikipedia says circuit bending is:

"...the creative, chance-based customization of the circuits within electronic devices such as low voltage, battery-powered guitar effects, childrens toys and digital synthesizers to create new musical or visual instruments and sound generators. Emphasizing spontaneity and randomness, the techniques of circuit bending have been commonly associated with noise music, though many more conventional contemporary musicians and musical groups have been known to experiment with "bent" instruments. Circuit bending usually involves dismantling the machine and

Cateura sax from trash

adding components such as switches and potentiometers that alter the circuit."

Youll likely get a different definition of circuit bending from every person you talk to about it, but "BEND: A Circuit Bending Documentary" is a relatively good place to start if youre new to the genre.

While circuit bending is an aspect of the EWO that microcontroller people would likely enjoy, creatively reused materials seems to be an aspect of EWO thats more along the lines of what SCRAP Humboldt would focus on. When I did a YouTube search for  arduino recycle electric instrument, two of the more interesting finds were The Recycled Orchestra of Cateura and Bash The Trash. There are countless other videos of musical instruments made from upcycled goods, so if Humboldt musicians and upcyclers want to join forces, there

Bash The Trash cardboard trombone

are plenty of examples out there to learn from, and homegrown ingenuity can add local flavor to the effort. Most of the instruments in these videos arent based on Arduino or other microcontrollers (MCUs), but there are plenty of musical instruments made with the SCRAP Humboldt approach to creatively reusing materials, and there are enough MCU-controlled instruments to make it an enjoyable challenge for the electronically-inclined members of the Humboldt Microcontrollers Group.

Make some music (with any type of instrument or source materials you prefer) and make the world a better place!

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