Friday, October 21, 2016

Sound Reactive Moving Head Lights

Recently, we tried to challenge ourselves to find more custom ways to drive moving head lights!  One such method we came across that had us very excited was using the output from real-time audio analyzers as inputs for the moving head lights!



The process involved building a custom application in Quartz Composer that took audio from our computer's music player and passed it through a real time analyzer (RTA).  The RTA, based on the gain of a certain frequency, would raise or lower a bar on an output image corresponding to that frequency.


That image was then used as an input for MadMapper.  In MadMapper, we then mapped DMX outputs over ArtNet to the moving head light's tilt to be the average luminosity of rectangles mapped over the minimums and maximums of the RTA bars.  The end result is the gain of a specific frequency would control the input value for a specific movers tilt.  The results were pretty cool!