A tiny unit that translates a frequecy of sound into a blinky. Really this component is a transitor where the base charge is driven by sound ( crystal?, charge in a torsion bar?) and the circuit drives an led.

I was thinking of spider webs of fairy lights on a concert stage. These lights are special in that they react to the sound waves, in the stage volume, in real time rather than computer timing patterns.

Frequencies and colors would be totally up to the artistic flair of the musicians. This would be subject to current LED colors, and frequency ranges of the base mechanics.

A wide spread through the stadium and audience might show sound propagation as a visual spectacular.
-- wjt, Nov 30 2014

Flicker_fusion_threshold http://en.wikipedia...er_fusion_threshold
Visible Flcker [csea, Nov 30 2014]

Could be improved by a frequency divider that related audio (20-20kHz) to visual stimuli (~0.2Hz- 200Hz) in a logarithmic fashion. +
-- csea, Nov 30 2014


//A wide spread through the stadium and audience might show sound propagation as a visual spectacular.//

You could sprinkle a few million of these into an urban war scene. If a sniper shoots the S-LEDs would indicate exactly where the sniper shot from.
-- RickRantilla, Dec 01 2014


At least it sounds Xmassy
-- not_morrison_rm, Dec 01 2014


//the artistic flare of the musicians//

Won't the glare from the flares make it hard to see the LEDs?
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Dec 01 2014


[csea] frequency mapping is a good idea, but as described, I don't think there will be much visual distinction since in a lot of music the full orchestra is playing most of the time, so you'll usually be getting light over most of the spectrum. My first thought was to make is to map the visual spectrum to the octave, so every C would be red, E would be green, G# would be blue. But that still results in a pretty full spectrum whenever a full cord is being played.

Maybe the sound could be classified according to:

Volume
Tone purity: single frequency -- chord -- dissonance -- white noise
Pitch

Maybe use red proportional to the volume of sounds in the lower half of the frequency ranges and blue for the volume of sound in the upper half, with a gradual crossover centered around middle C. Then use green to indicate the complexity of the chord structure with no green indicating a pure tone, levels of medium green indicating major chords, minor chords, and dissonance with bright green indicating white noise (most drums).

Hmm, still not right since you can't see the melody or the chord progressions. It seems to me that translating music into a single linear sequence of light is not easy. If we weren't trying to make all the lights have the same output we could have some with a color mapping over an octave that could follow the melody. Others lights could follow harmony in some way. It would still be challenging to make it so that any chord with a harmony that sounds "good" results in pleasing color combination and dissonant sounds would have poorly coordinated colors.
-- scad mientist, Dec 01 2014



random, halfbakery