[PIC] Analog music processing for lighting

Hello everyone.

I didn't know if posting this on digital signal processing because I need to digitally process signals but not entirely with the MCU.

I have used PIC and Freescale microcontrollers (I prefer using PIC because there are lots of tutorials) and I started a personal project which consists in lighting for parties and that things.

I made a pure analog version and it worked pretty well, but the effects were the same all the time. It was not notourious but I wanted it to make different effects.

I am thinking of three (R, G, B) lights or several of them, working together.

What I have in my mind is a MCU which detects the different parts of the songs being played (in real time) and make different effects according to the song part. For example, a slow effect for the verse, a faster and blinking effect for the chorus part, and that stuff. Perhaps using analog filters and comparators or even the internal MCU ADC different parts could be detected.

Counting the beats (peaks) of at least three bands (bass, middle and treble) could give the MCU an idea of how the song is, obviously I will have to program it for recognizing the part according to how many beats of each band.


Could anyone give me ideas for that? Have you any other ideas? Please let me know, everyhing is useful.

This might help you.Although it is a detection algorithm for beats in a song,I guess similar methods can be used to detect bass,middle and treble of the music.
https://dsp.stackexchange.com/questions/9521/simple-beat-detection-algorithm-for-microcontroller

When I was not thinking about using a MCU I used that envelopment method to filter the bass signal and to get peaks, it worked. Now I will try to use the MCU as comparator and with some timer calculations I think that it can work.