My final project is an LED sculpture — a shop safety glass equipped with LED strips. The design allows the LEDs on the glass to react to audio, activating when the user speaks.

I began by removing the plastic cover of the LED strip, then cutting the strip into precisely measured pieces that were glued to the glass frame. Each power, ground, and signal socket was then soldered; there are 48 sockets in total, so the soldering required considerable effort. Fortunately, the process went smoothly, and after a few tests and failures, the circuit proved workable.

Since the sculpture uses two LED strips but I wanted to control them with one driver, the driver also needed to be modified and reconnected. It turned out that one driver can support at least two strips, depending on the length and voltage of each strip.

In MadMapper, 'Hue Wave' was added to the library, and the line count was controlled via MIDI — the sound level can now control the number of lines in the graphic. The graphic was evenly mapped to the 27 LEDs on each side of the glass. When the user speaks, or the ambient sound level increases, the glass illuminates.