Hello all,

for the past 20 years my parents have had a box that they would plug the christmas tree lights into. it would play music and control the lights based on whatever song it was playing. the music was very simple synthesized one "instrument" songs. When a note would play the lights would come on, when the note stopped the lights would slowly fade then come back to full intensity when the next note hit. If there was a long pause the lights would just fade after the next note until they were out completely, then come on again when the next song/note was played.

I was wondering how difficult it would be to build some sort of circuit that would emulate this device. It would need to have some sort of audio input and it would need to send power to the lights when it detected an audio signal, then alowly decrease the amount of power until it detected another audio signal.

If there's a cheap little box I could just go buy that would do this that would be fine...it's just that all I've found are these mega control your whole house systems. I mainly want to be able to plug in any type of music device and have the lights react to it.

thanks!

You can back 30 years to high school electronics and build a light organ .. I had one and should be easier to do now .. for what you need.. I'm trying not to age myself O>K>

well i did some reading up on the light organ but I think it's actually more advanced than what I need. It looks like the light organ turned on/faded off different lights based on the frequency being played. This would only need to turn on/fade out all lights for any frequency played.

thanks!