How are lights in concerts and festivals synced so precisely to the music and the artist. My question regards both the mechanical lights and the human operated ones like spotlights.
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There’s a few tricks often used at modern shows. Some light patterns are manually triggered by a lighting engineer watching the show, listening to the music, knowing the songs, and using a lot of intuition to trigger those effects in time with the band. These effects can either be manually drawn or come as presets in the program. Commonly when the lights flash rapidly during heavier parts of songs, that’s manually times to switch between a default good resting image and the flashing effect which is a preset.
There’s also sequences of effects set up in an order for specific songs for intentional effects. An example I had built a sequence for was a band I worked with would play Bohemian Rhapsody which has a very famous progression and is a very interactive song. I had patterns built for the very call and response nature of the song and would advance through the sequence in time with the music.
For more generic songs, to maintain an interest curve in the cooler effects, and to give both the musicians and audience a break so they didn’t get overwhelmed by constantly moving lights, there are other static profiles used or drawn just to sit for a while. Usually very mild colours and less harsh brightness that got turned on and left there untouched for a song or two. These profiles also included times when the band is taking a break for a few minutes. Static lights that are very dim just to see the person addressing the crowd or so that the band can see what’s on stage but that’s contextual.
While there’s a lot of stuff that gets rehearsed to achieve a very specific effect, there is quite a bit that is done on the fly. The softwares we use very often have a real time animation to see what the lights will do so there are times when those are setup in advanced and run or we just think “it’s been a while since we’ve used the lasers and I know it’d fit here so screw it, let’s use some lasers.” Much like how musicians often throw in their own improv, lighting and audio engineers often do the same, sometimes for creativity and sometimes to compensate for the performers doing their own thing. I’m not going to build a super structured pattern if I know the guitarist has a solo they never play the same twice. I’m either gonna leave that one to be very general or make something simple that I can control and alter to keep up with stuff like their movements or vibe.
Source: have done both lighting and audio engineering for the majority of my life for moderately big profile acts (orange county choppers, the stone pony in new Jersey, did a show where Bon Jovi’s keyboardist showed up which was really fun)
Edit: kind of rambled a lot so the structure of my comment isn’t the most coherent, most of that insight stems from personal experience and how I built my shows
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