What You See is What You Hear
Visualizing Algorithmic Music with Hardware
I’m building a project for this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire. I’ve been thinking about this project for a long time. It is composed of a matrix addressed set of 256 LED’s and small speakers. Nothing new about using matrix addressing for LED’s, but speakers?
I’m using a PIC microcontroller to address the array. I will also demonstrate the use of an Arduino Mega to drive this type of display.
I was curious about what would happen and what would be perceived when the sound and light pattern were produced by the same sound and light array.
I’m coding various ways to program the array. The first method I’m using is an idea called one-line algorithmic music. There is a loose group of international enthusiasts who experiment with this method for generating sound.
In a spin on this idea in 2011, a Finish developer, called Viznut, posted videos which caught my interest including this site. http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symphonies-from-one-line-of.html
Visnut and another developer, Bemmu, created a web-based platform to explore these algorithms: http://wurstcaptures.untergrund.net/music/
I’m also coding some other ideas based on iterative functions. These can reveal some interesting complexity in sound and light patterns.
