The detail that caught me off guard is that this sculpture gets startled. Sounds it hears often stop surprising it, but something new makes it react again, and that is a long way from the usual flash-to-noise behaviour. The stated goal was a light object that feels a bit alive rather than just bouncing to sound, and that habit of learning seems to fit the idea well.
The build itself is hands-on all the way. The clay body was shaped and painted black by hand, sitting on a plaster base, with cracks cut by hand and filled with a translucent filler so light escapes through them. Inside there are 33 LEDs placed behind those cracks, a Raspberry Pi Pico running MicroPython, a MAX4466 microphone, and an RCWL-0516 radar module that senses whether anyone is in the room.
The beat tracking is the part the maker calls hard, and the numbers back that up. It samples low and sharp sound every 10 milliseconds, searches for a tempo between 78 and 156 BPM, and locks in within 5 to 15 seconds on the 8 tracks tested. Once the tempo is steady it keeps its own beat clock, correcting it twice a second, and lights a different crack on each beat. There is no fixed threshold deciding what counts as a beat, and speech or random noise gets ignored. When nobody is near, it falls asleep after about 40 seconds.
One thing still open: no public repository exists yet, though the maker says the code will probably be shared later. I would very much like to read it.