A project to make a lightbulb talk
Animating a talking lightbulb - a character in All Your Wants And Needs Fulfilled Forever, a meta-theatrical ride featuring action packed mime, original songs, and a pulsing electronic score all performed live, created by The Playground Collective - for the 2016 UK tour.
While this implementation wasn't used in the end (an Ableton Live setup was instead), it was a great opportunity to play with streaming sound to python and seeing what it could do!
This app requires the following dependencies:
- cffi==1.14.2
- numpy==1.19.1
- pycparser==2.20
- pyenttec==1.2
- pyserial==3.4
- sounddevice==0.4.0
To install, run:
pip install -r requirements.txt
There are two things you need to setup before you can start the app:
When starting the app, you get to choose your input device.
If you're using a microphone/external sound, pick your systems input device.
If you want to react to sound being generated on the same machine (e.g. from QLab), you'll need to route the sound through a loopback interface such as Soundflower.
Soundflower provides QLab (or your playback software) with an 'output' device it can play music to. If you choose this same device in the application, it'll receive the audio.
You'll need to connect ENTTEC DMX Pro (or compatible) adapter and have it connected to the appropriate DMX universe your talking lightbulb lives on.
The DMX channel the lightbulb is on is configured at the top of the script - it's '5' by default but can easily be changed.
You should be good to go! Just run:
python3 main.py
...choose your input and DMX devices and your bulb will be ready to speak.