Chromatic Spiral

Music Sculpture

This is a LED Light Sculpture I built - It's a physical representation of the physics and geometry of music - the log spiral that its based on illustrates the relative wavelengths of tones in our 12-note chromatic music system. The wavelengths are measured from the center circle to the LED firing areas.

Three full octaves are rendered in the spiral, plus there is another non-scientific outer octave to round out the circular shape of the piece.

There are a total of 181 Programmable RGB LEDs, all controlled by an Arduino DUE microcontroller. (originally I built it with the Arduino MEGA series microcontroller, but upgraded to the newer DUE ARM architecture in latest build, for improved performance and FFT capabilities) The program I wrote in C++ converts MIDI music data into the light shows on the sculpture. I built a library of code to recognize and interpret music theory, and the Music Spiral has several modes in which it can operate and change the light shows. It can separate instruments on different channels and render them in specific colors, render colors based on note frequency, or the light shows and color schemes can be rendered based on key signature and the consonance or dissonance of each note related to the key.

You could build an actual music instrument out of this same log spiral geometry. If you were to equally tension 12 strings from the center point to each of the spiral intersect points on the outside, you could fret each string at the inner spiral intersections, and get an octave up (1/2 length), or two octaves up (1/4 length).



Music Spiral Demos

Some Misc Photos of Prototyping / Work in Progress: