Rhythm
The fireworks are launched in choreographed fashion to music broadcast over the radio. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own radios to listen. During the day of the fireworks show, the park is host to musical stages featuring a variety of musical styles from oldies to marching bands. A carnival is also set up in the park, and a Madison Mallards baseball game is played in the afternoon. The show is preceded by a Wisconsin Army National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter landing, and a Wisconsin Air National Guard F-16 jet fighter fly-over. Music from a variety of genres accompanies the fireworks when they begin at around 9:30PM.
Radios are required mostly because it is easier to synchronize the musical rhythm with the booms going on in the sky, since radio waves travel at the speed of light. There is also the practical consideration of getting enough speakers, amplifiers and wires for a traditional sound system for 300,000 people. In the actual shows, speakers are not used at all.
Read more about this topic: Rhythm And Booms
Famous quotes containing the word rhythm:
“I remember the stink of the liverwurst.
How I was put on a platter and laid
between the mayonnaise and the bacon.
The rhythm of the refrigerator
had been disturbed.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses. The death has occurred much earlier.”
—Erica Jong (b. 1942)
“Protestantism came and gave a great blow to the religious and ritualistic rhythm of the year, in human life. Non-conformity almost finished the deed.... Mankind has got to get back to the rhythm of the cosmos, and the permanence of marriage.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)