Beat Recognition

Flashing colors and lyrics through beat recognition

This project utilized the microphone of mobile devices in a naïve approach for recognizing beats in a song. Beats where translated into flashes of color and song lyrics on the mobile devices. The color flash would result in a colorful wave moving across the audience and the lyrics would let the audience participate in a massive sing-a-long!

The beat recognition was done by listening to the sound frequencies and filtering snare and bass drum sounds. If the amplitude of the frequencies exceeded a threshold, a beat was registered and the mobile reacted by flashing a color on the screen and activating the flash on the phone. The threshold was changed dynamically by taking samples of the sound. The threshold was adjusted accordingly to the samples in order to accommodate for different sound levels due to microphone manufacturing or the positioning of the user. The color and lyrics were transmitted to the mobile clients via WebSockets.