| The moral of the story seems to be missing. This kind of visualisation is an arbitrary artistic choice, not just a function of inputs. A can of spray paint is a tool that needs to be mastered, and it's different from, say, oil paints and brush. LED strip is just another tool. You need to figure out first which movements, pulses, patterns it can produce, and what “looks good”. Those would be the strokes. The same happens on the other side. Choosing how to interpret sound is also an artistic choice. Everyone does the audio spectrum because everyone has seen the audio spectrum, and considers it a “natural” projection to some one-dimensional form. It only seems “natural” because of all of the graphs you've seen in textbooks. The need to use log scale or smoothing when real audio is not a pure set of harmonics is how “nature” has to smuggle itself back into the abstract reasoning. Beats work for a reason: what we call “modern music” is defined by its constant use of rhythm. When you have a different kind of sound, you need to process it differently. So the goal is to match something you hear in the audio with something nice that the LED strip does. Which is also an arbitrary artistic choice, and can only be judged as a whole. There is no rule that tone has to match specific position or specific colour. Also, people rarely look at LED strips on their own. Just like film crews, you need to take ambient environment into account, and sometimes increase contrast with light, sometimes blend everything together. Some kind of compressor/expander for dynamic range is probably needed for different environments. Often the thing that reflects the light is more important. I'd even say that the best way to increase the complexity of that low resolution source is to combine it with some complex object instead of using just the straight line. A Christmas tree should come to mind as an example. It is wrong to think that the goal of such projects is to figure out a perfect simple process that turns one array of values into another. Their goal is to make people feel something. |