Sound to light RGB without microphone

Development Boards Arduino
1

Hi there,

I’m relatively new to arduino coding and have just finished my first major project.

What I want to achieve is to take an audio signal from my pc and make it light up 4 RGB strips depending on what frequencies are in the sounds playing.

As my sound is carried through HDMI I could do with a program (if anyone knows of one) that could output data to the arduino mega that I have connected behind my tv screen to the 4 RGB strips.

I want to avoid using microphones as inputs as I can’t afford to buy anything else for this project. The 4 strips would flash at the same time which would hopefully make it easier?

Any help would be greatly appreciated as I can’t seem to find anyone who has done this before me.

2

Arduino’s simply can’t do HDMI decoding, to get at the (digital) audio. The data is too fast.

Even sampling a microphone and doing fast fourier transforms on it can be a Olympic game for the Atmega microcontrollers.

Save up money to buy something like this to sample only the filtered frequency bands of an analog signal:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/13116