Adding audio reactive lighting to an environment

Audio reactive lighting enables lights added to an environment to react to the music that is being played, by modulating their intensity or brightness in sync with the music.

Vinyl Reality analyses the audio signal that plays through the master output of the mixer in real-time and tries to detect the beats as well as the relative changes in energy in the music that is playing.

For example, when the music transitions from a quiet section (ex: a breakdown or intro) to a more intense part (ex: a drop), the energy level also changes from low to high.

There are 3 different energy levels:

• Low: During quiet parts of a track, for example an intro or breakdown
• Normal: During most parts of the track where the energy remains stable
• High: During energy peaks or fast energy increases, for example during a drop

These energy levels are used to transition between different Lighting Color Schemes, for example from warm and saturated colors for a low energy level to very bright and cold colors for higher Energy Levels.

Energy Levels also control which Program Light Array Configuration assets is activated by the Audio Reactive Light Controller Array.

To add audio reactive lighting to a custom environment, a couple of components need to be added to the scene.

• Scene Lighting Descriptor: Defines which color schemes should be used for this scene.
• Audio Reactive Light Controller Array: Groups Light Controller components into an array and controls how this array reacts to the audio analysis data received from the application.
• Light Controller: Updates Unity components (ex: Light) or assets (ex: Material) with the HDR color sent by the Light Controller Array.

The example environment that is included in the SDK package, demonstrates how to use all of these components together.