My project is about to make a live performance system or program that include visual in the screen, stage lighting, live camera, projection, and control interface. The visual and lighting effect are driven by audio data in real time. My motivation to do this project is wanting to build a low-cost live performance system for artists who have limited budge to run a show. If the artists or musician have low budge to run a small-scale show, maybe they could not have enough budge to hire different people to do different thing. Then the system could run visual and lighting automatically. The system is design for live music events in a small venue which can be indoor or outdoor. When the program is running, the artists just focus on their performance. The visual and lighting will response based on the music in real time. The system could be flexible use as the needs. Users can choose to use all functions or some functions. For example, they can use only projector to present visual patterns or only lights.
I will use Processing to build the system. In order to better use the audio data to drive the visual and lighting effect, I need to learn how to use analysis in a sound library call Minim to analyze the audio signal. I think it is importance aspect in this project. Also, I need to use different libraries in Processing to control different equipment such as lighting instrument.
So far, I have tested a library call dmxP512 and DMX interface to control a moving light. They were working together. Next step is getting a few lighting instruments to get more test with sound. And, learning FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) analyze in progress. The reason I want to learn FFT because I want to try using different shapes or behaviors to response different frequencies in a song.
Next, I will use these same data to test the fixtures to see how they react and think more about how to design the system.
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