Strobe Lights

A while back some friends and i decided to pay Zouk a visit. During my long, eventful night there, which is a whole different story, i was rather fascinated with how the lights worked. The flashy-ness made movements appear in slow motion, abrupt and choppy. A few days later, i was talking to another friend and she mentioned that she had realized the same thing. Okay, call me weird or whatever, but i've decided to write a blog specially dedicated to club lights...in particular, strobe lights.

The word strobe is actually a shortened form of stroboscope which derives partly from the Greek word strobos, which means "to whirl." You may wonder what whirling has to do with a light that flashes on and off rapidly. Well, back in 1830 an Austrian named Simon Ritter von Stampfer found that he could create an interesting effect by spinning a disk with sequential, slightly changing images and looking at the images on that disk through a slit small enough to show only one image at a time. He called his device the stroboscope, and it went on to become a very popular "scientific toy."

Allow me to digress a bit here and discuss the persistence of vision and how it applies to stroboscopic effects. When we see an object, an image of that object remains on the retina for a brief period (about 1/5 of a second) even after it has been removed from our field of vision. When we see two things in rapid succession, with some minor change from one to the other, our brain merges the two images and we perceive them as one object in motion. The discovery of this effect led to the invention of many early forms of animation, including the stroboscope.

Now, strobe lights work by only allowing us to see an object a few times a second. Because our brain is still merging the images it's getting from the retina, the effect is that we perceive the object in "slow motion." Over the years, the term strobe light has been applied to any light that flashes fairly rapidly.

Today, strobes are used in the entertainment industry as a way of adding a little flash. A drum kit can be decorated with several "egg strobes" (small strobe lights that can be screwed into standard light sockets) to make it stand out from the back of the stage. Egg strobes can also be built into balloon arches or into a display to attract attention. Mobile DJ's can also use these miniature strobes to enhance their current lighting rigs, adding a visual punch to their set-up for a fairly low price.

So, the next time you're bombarded with flashing lights in the dark room of your favorite club, you know why people appear to be dancing or moving in slow motion because of the persistence of vision and stroboscopic effects.