Simon Pearson - minor9th.com

Making light from music: a little update

posted in Piano Lightbox

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It’s been a super-busy summer, and honestly I’ve been too busy ordering power supplies, resistors, lights, ping pong balls and hiring trucks to spend time writing.

A much more lengthy post will follow, but the good news is that things are coming together really well. About 10 days ago I fitted a second-hand PNOScan to my piano (supplied by the awesome Jack Butler), configured it, and now my piano pretty reliably spews out midi data secretly from underneath the keys. It’s a bit naughty and magical when things which don’t look electric start triggering things.

Since then I’ve been tuning the lights. They now come on reliably and shoot along the strands of LEDs in different colours depending on the note that’s input. I’ve also upgraded to an Arduino Mega, and added a set of 12 potentiometers (knobs, for the uninitiated like me), which give the player control over their flavour of synesthetic experience. For me, I think that D should be a bit purple, E flat a bit yellow, and G a bit red, but now that’s totally customisable.

I don’t have pictures of that bit yet (it’s mostly a mess of wires, which I need to sort out) but here’s a little hurried, poor-quality video of the lights moving along the string about 10 days ago. It’s really exciting seeing this come together, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Next? Lots of things. Sorting the decoration (which awesome colleague and friend Denise Wilton is helping with), and doing final tweaking and testing. I’ll also post circuits and code too once they are a bit more final.

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