For most of 2015, I worked on a commissioned collaboration with Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips to build a series of sound-reactive lighting sculptures. Wayne had a skull replica he cast in clear resin that refracted the lights in an interesting way. We created a silicon mold of the object so that unique copies could be made using colored resins, and created custom controllers for controlling the RGB lighting. Working with my production studio LadyBrain Studios, we worked with various mediums such as circuit design, custom programmed sound processing, CNC routed circuit housing, molded and cast crystal clear resin designs. Thanks to Haley Moore, the co-founder of LadyBrain Studios and to programmers Oguz Yetkin, Adam Love, and Ed Krohne. http://www.ladybrainstudios.com/works/universal-death-sound-light-cube-no-1-aka-the-waynebrain/
Full Story:
The Universal Death Light and Sound Cube is an ongoing sculpture series of interactive light sculptures, created by Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips, his friends at the Womb Gallery in Oklahoma City, and LadyBrain Studios.
Coyne approached Darcy Neal and Haley Moore of LadyBrain Studios originally to add a sound element his brain sculpture and to assemble it as a standalone unit. The LadyBrains team quickly got to work, and installed an analog sound circuit that reacted dynamically to the light levels of the brain, and also wired the lights to a microcontroller so that they were able to trigger sections of the brain as desired. Coyne gave the LadyBrains team the opportunity to create a customized brain based off of ideas that they collaborated on.
The next brain they built was customized to the ideas discussed between Wayne Coyne and LadyBrain Studios. The new v.2 of the Universal Death Sculpture was custom built so that the lighting reacted dynamically to the sounds that were being played through the brain via FFT analysis. The sculpture was built to be a standalone unit with an embedded microcontroller for triggering the audio and lighting. Using FFT analysis, they began to trigger the lights based off of the frequencies heard within the songs, which were stored on a removable SD card.
They also created a Neopixel driver breakout board, that used custom code written to trigger the lights, so that they could use the same FFT code to control much brighter, more powerful LED installations. The enclosures for the brains were created using CNC technology and the silicone mold was created at the Dallas Makerspace, so that we were able to get exact replicas of the brain sculptures for future production. There have been 7 brains produced so far, with new designs in the works utilizing WS2812 RGB LEDs and a Raspberry Pi to do video playback across the surface of the brain.
