OK so this is an idea I initially came up with while sitting through an ETC Representative’s promotional lecture in my DRAM 204 Lighting Class on December 22 2021.

Here was my notebook page from that day:

The idea is basically what is outlined there, but I’ll summarize it here because that handwriting is hard to read I suppose.


The Idea:

Take the emission spectra of a light source like a CFL or a normal lightbulb, or of an elment like hydrogen, and turn those representations of light into sound.

To make that clearer, here’s an image of the emission spectra of a bunch of common lightbulbs and also types of sunlight:

Using the data from these, I would turn the spiky curves of a flourescent tube (B) into the beats of a rhythm, or perhaps map the slow rise of an incandescent bulb (A) onto the pitch to create a riser. I would probably just use whatever that gave me as a basis for a song or something thematically related to the light source that inspired it (I can imagine great lyrics about a mercury vapor streetlight), because music purely based on data often sounds kind of bad. 1


First Attempt:

I thought I would start with hydrogen, because it’s the first element in the periodic table, I vaguely remembered talking about its spectral lines in Chem at CSW, and it seemed easier than almost anything else. So I took the Balmer Series (all of this information was ripped from this Wikipedia page) which looks something like this: Using PureData2 (which I had VERY little experience with) made a sine wave oscillator for each spectral line at its wavelength – 410 nm becomes 410 Hz, and so on. Then I turned them on at an interval based on that wavelength (so the 410 Hz osc turned on every 410 ms, and then turned off again after a delay). The patch looked like this:

And it worked pretty well! It made a very fun polyrhythm which only would perfectly align once every 1.799 years (that’s 656.6 days) of continuous playing.3 But I wanted reverb because it didn’t sound great (depsite being super super cool… weird how that works sometimes…) and that led me down a rabbit hole and is how I discovered Erbe-Verb. If someone else is reading this and wants to play with that patch (and also for my own fun archival purposes since I’ll definitely iterate over it and lose it) it’s here.

AS OF WRITING, I LEFT OFF HERE. MAYBE I’LL DO MORE SOMETIME.


  1. Tantacrul’s Sonification & The Problem with Algorithmic Music is a great video on that idea and this whole concept in general (and also things like trying to make “the sound of space”), and might be a good argument against me doing this at all, but I don’t really care. It’s worth a watch though. ↩︎

  2. If someone other than Lev is reading this for some reason and is interested in trying out PureData (or if Lev is reading this and has forgotten everything about it) I reccomend Daniel Simu’s video Making Generative Music | Intro to PureData which taught me basically everything I know about it. I also reccomend his videos on juggling (especially Alphabet of 3 Ball Juggling) and his video on Light Pong (a game he created).
     ↩︎

  3. I think huge polyrhythms like this where it doesn’t line up for a long long time but you can feel it getting more and then less aligned so it almost functions like a melody are really really cool and something to play with more in the future. ↩︎