Christmas Freaks, Rejoice!
Ever wanted the most riotously awe inspiring public display of Christmas enthusiasm? Witness the Best Christmas Lights Display Ever. Get cracking there, Overachievers! You got some Joneses to keep up with!
Labels: art, holiday, interactive, music, video
posted by k_sra at 11/23/2005 01:31:00 PM
8 Comments:
Link didn't go to anything christmassy.
Ok, it worked this time. Wow! I love it. Cool, flashy, and energy-efficient. I bet the average wattage is about the same as a traditional display. Would drive your neighbors insane fairly quickly though.
Finally got this to work. It's hard to believe that this is an actual, real-time, light display on someone's house. If it's real, all I can say is Wow!
OK, snopes thinks it might actually be real. It appears to be the work of Carson Williams, who lives in Mason, Ohio.
Did a bit of research and read up on the Light-O-Rama stuff that Snopes mentions. Looks like the cheapest stuff they've got is about $100 for 8 channels. This guy was using 88 channels. So, he's invested over $1000 on just that. And that doesn't include the wiring, lights and sound system. I don't even want to think about how much time it took to wire up and program.
I could imagine a home-brewed system that would work well and be (comparatively) inexpensive. Create a CD with the left side supplying music and the right side supplying light information. This information would consist of 100 different frequencies of sound, each frequency used for a string of lights. The CD should be reasonably easy to create using tracking software (like MIDI, but using sound samples). Then all you need are band-pass filters, operational amplifiers, and a whole lot of extension cords.
A few benefits to this technique:
1. You could vary the amplitude of the sound signals and have variable intensity lighting.
2. You could use any CD and although the effect won't be as cool as the one in the video, you'd still get the lights flashing to the music.
I did something very similar to this for Halloween. Only managed to get 6 frequencies on it, though.
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