Chromatic Spiral

Music Sculpture

This is a LED Light Sculpture I built - It's a physical representation of the physics and geometry of music - the log spiral that its based on illustrates the relative wavelengths of tones in our 12-note chromatic music system. The wavelengths are measured from the center circle to the LED firing areas.

Three full octaves are rendered in the spiral, plus there is another non-scientific outer octave to round out the circular shape of the piece.

There are a total of 181 RGB LEDs, all controlled by an Arduino MEGA 2560. The program I wrote converts MIDI music data into the light shows on the sculpture.

You could build an actual music instrument out of this same geometry. If you were to equally tension 12 strings from the center point to each of the spiral intersect points on the outside, you could fret each string at the inner spiral intersections, and get an octave up (1/2 length), or two octaves up (1/4 length).



Music Spiral Demos