Hi Leshay.
Lovely design on your other coats. Stunning.
I have some thoughts. Recently did some wearable tech for my kid’s party. Not saying I’m an expert, just have thoughts to contribute.
Materials
If I were doing this I’d look at
a) Textile LED Filaments and weave them together with the rest of my coat to build a particular colour pallet and aesthetic.
b) A flexible strip that I can easily sow into the zipper lining. I’d use it as a backlight, sowing other textures and fabrics on top of it and let the light bleed through the beautiful mess. This will require more power and so you’re battery will drain faster.
Do either of those options sound good to you?
Battery.
The big one here is how many leds do you need and how bright.
Let’s be pessimistic and guess that they draw 1 amp over the course of an hour. That would mean a 2amp/hour battery would give you two hours. That would be no worries if you were going to a photoshoot and pretty dismal if you’re going to a light festival or something.
The levers you have to pull here are how much light your design requires and how big a battery you can hide in the coat.
I bet you can fit this bad boy battery in your coat or on a belt by your hips.
If you’re weaving it into your coat I would slip it into something like this for your safety, maybe even sowing the entire satchel for easy changes.
Lastly, I’ve used this tool for easy recharging and connection. Worked a treat.
@Ryan or CE team do you sell the LiPo safe materials for use in wearables? If not could you recommend a search term so we could find one?
Audio reactive.
You’ll need a microphone, I’d recommend a condenser.
@Ryan or CE staff do they make a more user friendly condenser breakout that i2c’s the amplitude and maybe has an inbuilt amp?
How I suggest you proceed depends on how much experience you have with software. I see two well trodden paths.
a) big sound => big light.
We need something that can capture the signal from the microphone and convert it into an envelope that looks aesthetically pleasing.
That means you need a micro-controller with a small footprint and I recommend this cute little sweetheart. It can run circuit-python code which is dead easy to write, and, although not the speediest, is faster than the human eye. The Trinket can also control you’re LEDs whether they are the noodles or the strips. It also consumes a tiny amount of power. 
I made some Christmas lights a long time ago where I go into the math of sonic envelopes for this kind of audio reactivity.
b) Spectrum Analysis.
This is what you’ll need if you want the coat to change it’s behavior depending on the music being played. I don’t think circuit-python is the right choice for a pure software approach to spectral analysis. The good news is I think you have room in you’re coat for an MSGEQ7 which has become a favorite chip of mine. If you want to go down this path I… developed a small MSGEQ7 addiction a while a go you can check out. There are hundreds of similar and possibly even shorter projects online too if you search MSGEQ7.
Good luck, and keep us updated.
Pix
