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:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman’s life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul’s highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The freeway experience ... is the only secular communion Los Angeles has.... Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway. The mind goes clean. The rhythm takes over.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)