article: Most are tourists looking up in awe at the LED screens that dominate the landscape. Nobody notices the tiny dark figure 350 feet above the pavement clinging to the side of the century old Times Building, home of the New Year's Eve Ball. Jeff Rolfe is a cross between Spider Man and Guy Fawkes, gingerly making his way up and down the side of the building with a bitter winter wind attacking him from every angle as he dangles. In his arms are pre-configured wooden racks full of small explosives. He has to install enough to put smiles on a billion TV viewers worldwide. Thankfully these are the finishing touches to a display of fireworks that in just over 24 hours will hopefully also elicit oohs and aahs from a million New Years Eve revellers in the Square. For almost everyone the thrill of fireworks is an experience that can be traced back to childhood. Yet if you were able to time travel backwards two, three or four decades into history and stand once again in front of your local town display, you would likely be disappointed. Mr Rolfe, from Fireworks By Santore, says few people realise that fountains, rockets, wheels and bursts have all taken a huge step forward thanks to technology. "The shows used to be much much longer, over an hour in duration. But attention spans are shorter now," he says. "Today, 30 minutes is considered a very long display. Technicians used to manually shoot big shells from steel tube mortars that would need to cool down before the next ones could be fired. It was more relaxed. Now we shoot multiple smaller shells per second from several locations, remotely." Songs were played in their entirety rather than the mixed snippets that are favoured today. And any notion of syncing the beats to the bursts was usually a happy accident rather than anything pre-planned. New software and hardware means shells and cannons can be fired remotely up to two miles away and timed to within 1/100th of a second. And in a world full of giant LEDs, laser beams and light shows, fireworks are frequently asked to become team players, which is why "syncing" is one of the most sought after skills in the industry. "Using computer software, we mark where we want the highs and lows of the display to be in relation to the music," says Mr Rolfe. "And then we backtrack all the timings, and create digital cues alongside the music track for the firing sequence in an FSK (Frequency Shift Keying) file. When you hear it, it sounds like the noise made by an old modem." Big events, especially those on live TV are usually produced using "timecode". A highly accurate digital clock signal is generated from a central source and every person, computer, device and camera at the event uses it as their only time reference. Music tracks, lighting and fireworks can be pre-programmed digitally to flow together perfectly. But it can take months of work by specialist designers to produce a dazzling display.
summary: Every year, on the evening before New Year's Eve, thousands of people in New York City amble through the neon glow of Times Square.