The Best Way to Display Lyrics as You Listen to Spotify Music
Matthew Sperry created this display dedicated to showing Spotify lyrics.
Before the internet, fans didn’t have a way to figure out what the singer of their favorite band was mumbling unless the record label happened to include a booklet of lyrics with the album. Today, Spotify users get to see song lyrics synced to the music they’re currently listening to and “excuse me while I kiss this guy” misunderstandings are a thing of the past. But nobody wants to listen to music while staring at the Spotify app, which is why Matthew Sperry created this display dedicated to showing Spotify lyrics.
This is possible because Spotify’s API (Application Programming Interface) is surprisingly comprehensive. It provides all kinds of information about your account, your music library, and whatever you’re listening to at the moment. In theory, it would be possible to recreate a great deal of the Spotify app’s functionality in a custom app using the Spotify API, which is why the service works well on so many different devices in platforms.
In this case, Sperry’s device uses the API to access the user’s Spotify account and pull the lyrics for the song they’re currently listening to. It can then show those lyrics on a screen large enough for anyone in the room read.
That screen is an Adafruit 64×32 RGB LED matrix with a pitch of 5mm, so it is pretty sizeable. It connects to a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B through an Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet. That gets power from a beefy 5V 4A power supply, which is more than enough for the Raspberry Pi and LED matrix. A 3D-printed frame keeps everything tidy.
Sperry created a fork of Ryan Ward’s Spotipi Python script to display the lyrics. From Spotify’s point of view, this is a custom app. That let’s it access the Spotify API and pull information on the user, like the song they’re listening to and that song’s information. From there, it just draws the text on the RGB LED matrix in the chosen colors.
This seems to work very well, with the lyrics synced almost perfectly to the music as it plays. For anyone who struggles to understand the words, this would be a perfect project.
