Help designing a music visualizer for a 12×12 LED screen

I am working in a group for designing a LED interactive Screen. My part of the project is the design of the music visualization system. I am new in this area, but I know I need to use some op-amps to filter the input signal from the mp3 player.
Could anyone give me any suggestions on how to continue on the project? I know there are several ways to do it (there are multiple ways to digitize the signal eg. FFT ) but I'm not very sure which one to follow.

Any help would be appreciated!

Thank you in advance!
Anna:)

Here is a sample project for an ARM that should get you started:

https://developer.mbed.org/users/Suky/noteboo...spectrum-analyzer-fft-32-points-and-lcd-20x4/

If you use one of the boards supported by MBED you can do all the development online and you can bypass the joys of toolchain setup (compiler, etc). There are ARM boards (like the STM Nucleo) that have Arduino headers so you might be able to use a prebuilt led matrix designed for Arduino.

I have checked this out, thanks for posting it! I would need something that would explain the theory behind it though because I need to do it by myself and be able to understand. If you know any page that could be of help it would be very appreciated, thanks!

For a high-level overview, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H144ipQa22Q

or google FFT or DFT. If you want the mathematical background, any college signals textbook will have a good treatment of FFT and inverse FFT operations (converting from time domain to frequency domain, Nyquist limits, etc).

You might also check out this if you are a visual learner:

http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-the-fourier-transform/

That's very helpful thank you! I am currently revising on analog amplifiers and filters and I will get to the FTT soon!