jakeparmstrong/lightshow

Play monophonic tunes using Sonic Pi and visualize them using LEDs on a Raspberry Pi from OSC messages.

lightshow

This project visualizes songs with LEDs using a Raspberry Pi. I wanted to build something fun to show my young niece over the winter holidays, so the first song that I wrote in this format was Jingle Bells; you can click here to see the song being performed.

Each LED represents a different note in a diatonic scale, with the leftmost LED representing "do", and the rightmost LED representing "ti".

The music is coded in, and played from, an instance of Sonic Pi that is running on my Raspberry Pi 3B+. The code sends OSC messages for every note played.

A Python script listens for these OSC messages, and lights up a corresponding LED in time with the music.

Materials

I used:

• Raspberry Pi 3B+
• 9 male-female leads
• 7 220-ohm resistors
• 7 LEDs (4 red and 3 green for the festive colours)

Circuit Diagram

Procedure

1. Start OSCtoLights.py (I ran it on Python 3.x). This script assigns LEDs to each GPIO pin used, listens on port 3585 for incoming messages, and parses those message to visualize one note at a time on te LED set. The code currently only looks at the pitch name being sent, and not the octave.
2. Run your Sonic Pi tune on the same Raspberry Pi. Make sure that you set the outbound OSC messages to use the same port (here, 3585).

Note: if you are writing your own sonic pi tunes, make sure to format the OSC messages as "octave/pitch". See sample code.