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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I used to be a sound engineer for about 7 years and did a few shows as a lighting director when I had to. There are a couple ways of making this happen depending on how technologically advanced a certain production is.
For smaller or simpler shows, you would have your lighting director (LD) manually operating a lighting board to the music being played as they hear it. This is the best option if a band is more fluid and playing off of each other.
For more elaborate productions, where a band (or in some cases just the drummer) is playing to a metronome to keep everything precise, the lighting changes can be automatically mapped to that same metronome. This is also the way that shows with a video element can synchronize a live performance to prerecorded elements. With smart lighting fixtures that can spin around and change colors, this can become really deep really quickly if your LD can program these things.
Spotlights are pretty much always directed by the LD calling out directions into a spotlight operator through an earpiece. When I was working in the industry, there were some lighting companies that were trying to develop spotlights that could automatically track people on stage but I don’t think it’s a common thing yet.
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