Im working on a similar project only my color is out put to video. I'm also new to max and have been out of college for almost two years. I got about as far as you, i'm controlling color with my audio level, but I want to use music notes to trigger exact color according to Newton's theories. If [analyzer~] can give me a music note that would be amazing but i think what really needs to happen is we need to get wave length and frequency displayed in a [flonum] box. wiki optics for info on color sound harmonization.

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if you’re only interested in the volume of the input, then try searching for envelope follower to get a smooth value from the changing amplitude. Beyond that perhaps Maxuino can help you

yep, for intensity only, you won’t need any kind of analysis besides the amplitude, grab that with number~ or snapshot~. use the float output to scale your color levels equally (using hsl message to swatch), just change the saturation and lightness.

Roman’s post says it all in about as compact a way there is…assuming you have the hardware part working, you can make this patch in about 30 seconds, literally.

so… maybe once you have that, you should dig some more?? :) I would vote for using analyzer~ or pitch~ or fiddle~ and go with your original idea, or you can delve into fft~ to get really intricate controls. But using pitch~ etc. will get you a long ways towards "higher tones do this, lower tones do that".

One of my earliest projects did something very similar. I don’t have max on this computer (my laptop), but I’ll take a look at when I get home. I remember using fiddle to get the pitch of an incoming sound, and making adjustments based on that information.

One of the problems that I am having is that you are speaking about sound in somewhat metaphorical terms. Do you mean that if the pitch (frequency) of a sound is within a certain range and increases in amplitude the lights in a certain color range are affected? If so, there seem to be multiple ways to go about this. The simplest way would be to use a split object (there is something better for multiple ranges… maybe an if object?) that controls where the amplitude information goes. So that if bass frequencies are the loudest their amplitude is what modifies the light.

What you would really want… I think, is something that detects the relative amplitude of all three frequency ranges that you have delineated and outputs all three, so that you could use these to directly control whatever it is you are changing about the light information.

Also, you mentioned recording in a big room, and I’m sure you have thought about this, but whatever room you are recording in is going to accentuate certain tones. Depending on how you want this to affect your project, you may want to look at where you place your microphones in relation to whatever is generating sound.

-Ryan

@GLX, look at the RainbowLips.tiff, that Shanti posted above. Self-explaining. And yeah, very cute!