There must be some folks like myself still alive and old enough to remember a device popular in the 1970’s called a Colour (for some reason my spell checker only likes the English version) Organ.\u00a0 It consisted of a box with light bulbs that were modulated to sound (usually music) behind prismatic glass so that colourful (spell checker again) patterns that flashed with the music.<\/p>\n
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Some were single channel using one colour, often an intense green, and others were multi-channel where they’d assign red to bass, yellow or green to mid-range, and blue to high frequencies.<\/p>\n
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Back then LEDs of significant brightness didn’t exist so incandescent lamps were used, usually 120V which required triacs and complicated driver circuitry.<\/p>\n
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I thought it would be cool to make a modern version, one could create many more channels using a DSP and a fast Fourier transform to separate the audio into many more channels and then simple driver transistors and low voltage DC to power bright LEDs of colours across the visible spectrum.<\/p>\n
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But, an essential component, prismatic glass, with a sufficiently small pattern to create a good display seems difficult to locate.\u00a0 Home Depot and Lowe’s seem to carry only a prismatic plexiglass and the pattern is to large and plain to be useful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There must be some folks like myself still alive and old enough to remember a device popular in the 1970’s called a Colour (for some reason my spell checker only likes the English version) Organ.\u00a0 It consisted of a box … Continue reading