First attempts with mid and high frequency bands went poorly. I had ran through a selection of songs to gather data on maximum values for the low, mid, and high sections of bands so that I could normalize each band value from 0 to 255. However, I was getting strange results where there was hardly any variance in the stroke’s color.

After I stepped away from my program for a while, I came back to realize a simple error. For data collection, I had set to look for the max value of each band (low, mid, and high) for the duration of the entire song. However, I forgot to reset this value for each wave drawn when ready for the actual generative art process. Thus, the color stroke would change only if the current max value exceeded the previous max value. Totally makes sense how towards the end of the song, the image would flatten into one color!

Unfortunately, even after this error was fixed, I was still unhappy with the results across songs.

I was very unhappy with these results. Colors ended up much too dark. And there wasn’t a whole lot of variation across songs.  At this point I decided to see what kind of results I could get out of the HSV color space.

Although the colors looked very interesting together, I came across the same problem. There was not a whole lot of variation across songs. I accidentally overwrote some images, so Hospitality’s “Eight Avenue” is currently the only image output from this system. I will add another example once I finish with my update.

Ultimately, after fighting my system over a period of a few days, I realized that I was quite happy with my original color algorithm. So I went back to my old system, and decided to fine tune that for my final display.