a NEW BRIDGE between sight and sound

Emotiscope is a big fan of your playlist. It's built-in microphone will automatically translate nearby music into a beautiful light-show synchronized to the notation, vibrato and tempo, with tons of customization available through a sleek web-app on your iPhone or Android phone! Not only is it a really great listener, there's no visible latency whatsoever. As soon as the drummer smashes a cymbal, Emotiscope is already lit up in response in just over 1/200th of a second.

LEARN MORE

a SMOOTH DISPLAY made of magic

No pixels here, at least not any that your eyes can see! Instead, 128 of the world's smallest addressable LEDs sit behind a magic diffuser that spreads the light into soft, creamy shapes that almost look more like an old oscilloscope or some kind of gas tube, rather than a digital display. Best of all, the frame rate is remarkably high, (200-450 FPS depending on your settings) making animations look incredibly smooth.

a BEAUTIFUL APP that doesn't suck

No ads, no price, no downloads, no account, no install. Just visit app.emotiscope.rocks on your phone from the same WiFi network Emotiscope is on, and you're automatically connected in seconds! (You can even bookmark it to your home screen!) Once there, you're greeted with a very simple interface with only one concept to learn: sliders.

Sliders work like knobs to control things like brightness, color, reaction speed, and more. Just drag your thumb up and down anywhere on the slider to alter it, and your changes are automatically saved to Emotiscope.

a MEDLEY of modes

There's a mode for every mood. A lot of work has gone into creating polished and engaging light-shows that react at a moments' notice to musical changes. So far, Emotiscope has 7 customizable light-show modes:

VIDEO DEMOS

ANALOG

Analog Mode simulates the movement of a analog VU meter, with dots of light reacting to the current loudness of music, wiggling to beats and vocals. Sub-pixel rendering tricks make this mode a visual treat you can't go wrong with.

SPECTRUM

Spectrum Mode shows the detected strengths of all musical notes between 110 Hz and 4186 Hz (The upper 64 keys of a piano), showing chords, vibrato and even basslines in the center! (For the music geeks, that's A2 through C8!)

OCTAVE

Octave Mode is the same as Spectrum Mode, but all 64 notes have been wrapped into a single octave - meaning all A♭ notes are in the same position on the display, regardless of which octave they originated from.

METRONOME

Metronome Mode is extra fancy. Your Emotiscope will synchronize itself to the beat of your music, swaying patterns back and forth exactly in time with the song. It's not only aware of what the current tempo (BPM, speed) of your music is, it also knows the magnitude of all tempi at a given time and displays all readings at the same time. For example, if the snare drum hits 90 beats per minute but the hi-hat hits 180 beats per minute, both patterns are detected and shown at the same time!

SPECTRUM + BEAT

This is actually a hybrid mode! When confidence in the tempo calculation is low, Spectrum Mode is shown, but as Emotiscope gains confidence in the beat of the music, it will fade into showing Metronome Mode instead.

HYPE

Hype Mode is for partying it up. This is the mode for dance music and bass drops. All tempo readings are summed up into a single wave, meaning complicated patterns can emerge from the average song, which are wiggling to and fro to the beat of the music. As a rule of thumb, if it's a song you think you could generate "hype" with, it works great with this mode.

BLOOM

Bloom Mode is quite versatile. Dragging the speed slider all the way down makes a slowly expanding pattern that flutters to your tunes, and turning the speed slider all the way up makes for a hypnotizing dive into a psychedelic tunnel.

SLUMBER at a touch

Done with the experience for now? Hold your palm over the top of your Emotiscope to send it off to dreamland. The microphone is immediately disabled, and a short visual outro plays on-screen as the device drifts off to sleep. To wake it, just tap the device and it's instantly ready again for another show. Tapping the top while Emotiscope is already awake cycles to the next light-show mode. (Not only is the top touch-sensitive, but you can hold your finger on the left and right sides to alter the display color without having the app open!)

WHAT'S INCLUDED in the box

Emotiscope comes fully pre-programmed, and ready to use out-of-box. Just plug it in with a USB-C cable (not included) and scan the QR code on the back of the unit to get started!

SENSORY BRIDGE re-imagined

Emotiscope was designed as an evolution of Sensory Bridge, a previous audio-visual experience by Lixie Labs. Loved by many, Sensory Bridge had finally hit the limits of what it could do. With a single-core ESP32-S2 with no FPU calculations, I was unable to do anything fancier than a highly optimized DFT, and struggled to get a WiFi interface running on top of that all.

Sensory Bridge was also bound by its hardware controls - only three knobs. Emotiscope takes that interface and digitizes it into satisfying and smooth sliders in the web-app, of which there could be an infinite number of them. Some sliders can even be exclusive to certain light-show modes, appearing and disappearing contextually.

However - for all of my Sensory Bridge fans - I'm going to make an honest attempt to backport the Emotiscope engine to Sensory Bridge in a final update later this year. I can't give any guarantees on timing or possibility, but it should be possible to release a feature-reduced (no tempo detection or 400 frames per second) single-core fixed-point version of the Emotiscope engine to Sensory Bridge, finally enabling its full wireless capabilities for long time fans.

On The Technical Side

For geeks interested in how it works, Emotiscope is using a dual-core ESP32-S3 to drive 128 addressable LEDs at 200-400 FPS depending on the mode. It uses 128 instances of the Goertzel algorithm running in parallel to decipher the strength of 64 musical notes, logs the spectral flux over time, and then derives the strength of 64 tempi from those as well.

Emotiscope has open source hardware and software, meaning you can modify or replace any parts at will, should you want to!