Advanced colour theory and Digital LED's vs Analogue LED's

Having now been with the system for over a week, and demonstrated it to a number of people, I definitely feel that the idea has legs beyond this project.

As with anything, I am now seeing how it could be advanced and improved upon, though currently I dont have the know how or the time before hand in date. Yesterday I stumbled upon a very impressive system that uses Digital LED's rather than their fully analogue counterparts that I am using. Now, undoubtedly this is a more complex system, bit it requires a laptop for operation and is a lot more expensive, so it would really be for a different market - my system still has validity (phew!). Also, in real terms this is not a true colour organ, where my system arguably is.

These guys have used FFT processing to calculate the dominant frequency band at any given time and display a corresponding colour, it is rather cool! Rather than blending RGB colours together to generate the rainbow. A set number of 12 colour blends, from Red through to Purple, have been mapped across each and every octave. Should the FFT device pick up more than one note, it will send each further harmonic above the fundamental to the LED striip, with its corresponding key mapped colour. The joy of digital control!

Looking into the future, I would definitely like to continue with this side of LED programming. The power of this system really is limited only by one's grasp of maths... You could have many hundreds of different maps for the digital LED strip, for everything from phase correlation to RMS vs Peak metering systems, random pattern gens, all sorts of crazy stuff.

I have watched this video a fair few times now, along with the previous video found on his YT page. Without doubt his system is more powerful and visually "tight" than mine - he specifically said that he wanted to develop a system beyond the standard  colour organ.

Despite this, it makes for an excellent comparison to my current system and efficacy of mapping colour across one octave vs the whole audio spectrum. There are inherent limitations when mapping all light colour across one octave.Going back to colour theory here for a second, if we mix RGB light in equal amounts, we get white light. When you are playing a fully mixed piece of music in my system, the blend of RGB is calculated by the arduino every 25ms, and displayed as a solid amount at that time. With the system seen above, this would not be possible in its current config. With a full piece of music, it would be almost inevitable for the resulting light output to be anything other than white. Even playing a seventh chord in any octave would cause this to happen. The system seen above has found a very clever and attractive way around this, but it simply wouldnt be possible with non-digital LED strips, which are a lot cheaper than their digital counterparts.

Being honest, though it could be easily be modified to be a properly effective audio metering system, in its current state, I feel like my system better represents the frenetic nature of analogue audio signals. It also better contextualises songs and their phrasing, along with mastering qualities.