Archive for October, 2010

John Lewis Harmony

Thursday, October 21st, 2010

Control software for the John Lewis Harmony project.

To promote John Lewis’ range of lighting products Adam & Eve and Upset Media created a house that featured lights from the current in-store range.

Nanika was tasked with writing software to interpret any incoming sound and convert it into a lightshow to be played out on the houses lighting system.

The software, written in C++ and using OpenFrameworks, had a number of different sound responsive scenes that we designed that then in turn instructed DMX-dimmers which had control over the 100 domestic light fixtures, making them synchronized to the music. 

Different sound reactive scenes were randomly selected with each new song, but an operator had facilities to choose from these scenes should he feel a particular particular scene would suit a particular song better.

A screen capture of the control software:
(The screen capture affects the sound synchronization a little bit)

As timescales were tight and noone would see the software outside of the team it did not receive too much design TLC.