Tuesday, December 12, 2006

Christmas lights

Merry Christmas from Cloud Sparrow and Little-Scale!

A set of Christmas lights with chaser functions triggers sounds from a real Atari 2600 going through some effects pedals. Watch the video here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Medcu1r58DA

The details of this setup are really straightforward. But since someone has asked me more about it, here we go.

The type of lights that have been used are actual light bulbs (not LEDs) and have coloured glass spheres around the bulbs themselves. The lights are actually all white. These coloured glass spheres have been removed for the first four lights (one of each colour).

Taped directly next to each of these four lights are light dependent resistors of the lower resistance type. Each of these LDR's are mimicking a button on a mock, homemade Atari 2600 "keypad", thus playing a note on Paul Slocum's Atari 2600 program SynthCart. The settings on the program are changed in real time to allow for the different sounds and pitch ranges.

The Atari 2600 has been modified to have a direct audio output (instead of only the RF output for video and audio). This audio signal is then routed to a preamp pedal (where there is some room for tonal control), then a very inexpensive (~AU$30) delay pedal and a phaser pedal. If you have any questions, please email me.

4 comments:

Tristan Louth-Robins said...

Yes, I love xmas lights i do. In fact we have a lovely little xmas tree in the office at the moment being illuminated by mulitcolour fibre optics...

Sebastian Tomczak said...

Yeah, chrissy lights are always nice.
Fibre optic trees are cool also...

See you... soonish??

Tristan Louth-Robins said...

Grad dinner..I've been invited along - as token EMU exile.

Anonymous said...

Lovely work Seb! Beautiful....I wonder if you visited the showroom of "x-mas lites 'r' us" and saw the plethora of other x-mas lighting on offer...what other delightful things you could come up with ....fantastic....
always a delight to visit little scale