(Hartford Courant, 7/26/17)
LED strips and twinkle lights flash constantly in the office of University of Connecticut professor Ed Large, just waiting for a beat to latch onto.
They’re controlled by a brain, an intelligent listening system designed by Large, who himself is partial to jazz and funk. He thinks his invention, Synchrony LED, which listens to music and creates real-time light shows, is too.
“If you play a rhythmically boring song. it’ll just go with the beat and it becomes boring really fast,” Large said of Synchrony’s lighting effects. “But if you listen to music that has an interesting rhythm, that’s when it does super interesting things.”
Large teaches psychological science and physics and directs UConn’s music dynamics laboratory. Synchrony, his first commercial product after 25 years of research, will be available for sale to the public this winter.