philips-hue-midi

Overview

Control your Philips Hue lights with your piano. This project is inspired by the perceptual phenomenon of Synesthesia. See it in action below:

Getting Started

What You'll Need

• Philips Hue Lights & Bridge
• A MIDI Keyboard

Installation & Setup

1. Connect your MIDI Keyboard: Attach your MIDI keyboard to your computer and ensure it's powered on.

2. Configuration: Copy the config.example.toml as config.toml. Set lights under channels.0 (master channel) to the list of Philips Hue Lights you want to control. See full-config.example.toml for a full list of configuration options.

3. Run Program: Navigate to project root and install the necessary dependencies using uv:

   uvx philips-hue-midi [config.toml]
   

Technical Details

The program samples incoming MIDI events sixty times per second (defined by SAMPLE_RATE). Controllers are responsible for taking this list of midi events (of variable size, M) and converting them to a list of midi events of size N, where N is the number of channels. These channels are defined in the config.toml file and are collections of lights and their configurations.

Currently, the default controller is the note_controller which takes in M notes and maps to 12 channels, based on pitch class. For example, the first channel will be activated if the note C is played, the second channel for C#, and so forth. Therefore, your configuration should have 12 channels.

Note that channel 0 is the master channel and is used for turning lights on or off and is the default fallback channel if the controller outputs a channel not configured. All lights you wish to control should be included in this channel.

Notes

You may have to set the MIDO_DEFAULT_INPUT environment variable to the name of your MIDI device if the correct midi device is not automatically detected. You can find the name of your MIDI device by running: bash uv run mido-ports.