They come for the game and stay for the halftime performance.
Fans flood into the Kibbie Dome during fall Saturday afternoons to see the Idaho football team hit the gridiron.
Yet, when many fans make a mass exit at half time, the stands stay relatively quiet and packed, full of fans waiting to see the real performance of the day.
The Sound of Idaho marching band is widely loved and revered across campus, from welcoming future students at campus events to entertaining audiences at halftime.
As if the music wasn’t enough of a show, the marching band partnered with the computer science department to take the performance to the next level using light-up glasses.
After Director of Athletic Bands Spencer Martin arrived in Idaho in 2012, he was put in touch with Computer Science Associate Professor Robert Rinker and the two began scheming up ideas, Martin said.
Lights on the ceiling and lights on the drums were just a few of the many ideas tossed around between Rinker and Martin in the brainstorming process. Martin said the band toyed around with lighted drums, but ultimately was looking for something off the beaten path.
“You can already kind of buy lighted drums,” Martin said. “It is already kind of a market thing and we wanted to do something that no one was doing.”
Around the same time, Martin said he stumbled across a company called Knockaround Sunglasses out of San Diego, and an idea sparked. Martin reached out to the company hoping to make a deal on the glasses to supply to the band.
“I said, ‘Hey, this is who we are, this is what we do, we can’t afford your glasses, but could we buy them at cost?’ and he said he’ll donate them to us,” Martin said. “He donated them to us over the years, about 500 pairs of sunglasses.”
After receiving the first batch from the company, Rinker said they needed more and reached out again in hopes of striking the same deal, but instead made another agreement.
“We kind of went back and asked them if we could do some more and he said, ‘Well yeah, we will donate some more, but I have two requests — you have to send a video of the performance where you use them, and part of that performance has to be the theme song from Magnum, P.I.,’ so apparently a big Tom Sellek fan so that’s what they did.”
With a plan in mind, Rinker began to tinker with the technology to make it work for the unique environment of the Kibbie Dome.
Though it may have been new to the band, Rinker said the technology was in the works for a while prior to the glasses.
The Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), a club through the Computer Science Department, began working with LED lightshow technology in 2011 with the Theophilus Tower lightshow.
When the marching band and computer science department started the partnership, the next step was converting the technology to fit into the band performance. Rinker said it started with light drums and tubas before transitioning into the glasses.
“We were sort of beginning to understand what to do and how to do it and all that, so the last couple of years we’ve been doing the goofy glasses,” Rinker said.
Once the plans were set, it was on to the production phase. Keeping in line with the student project, Rinker said it was computer science students and band members that led the charge in creating the glasses.
“We had a couple of build sessions, so the students designed them and then we had a couple of build sessions on Saturdays, kind of a pizza party thing, where we taught everybody how to solder things together and they built them all,” Rinker said.
After several Saturday pizza and build sessions, the team had created around 200 pairs of glasses and it moved into the trial phase.
As with all new technology, Rinker said he couldn’t sleep the night before the first full trial run, wondering what was going to go wrong. Instead, he said the whole system worked flawlessly, dazzling those on the production team and marching band members.
“They gasped,” Martin said. “I’ll never forget the first time we were in rehearsal and Bob turned them on and it was stunning, it’s so bright and you’re just surrounded by people.”
And if the band was not sold on the new performance addition, Martin said they were after the first full performance.
“When they got that reaction from the crowd at the end of the show, they were sold forever. It was done,” Martin said.
Even after several years, Martin said he loves the project for the unique opportunity it gives the students in the sciences to showcase their work.
“Have we reinvented the wheel? No, we are just turning on lights on sunglasses, it’s nothing crazy,” Martin said. “It’s the journey of not only coming up with it, but the journey of the students and the staff doing all that work to put it together and then us being the way to showcase.”
Regardless of where the partnership takes the technology and the performance in the future, Martin said the originality of the project will always be what makes it special.
“There is a real energy to doing things that only we do, it is a whole other type of success than trying to be like someone else,” he said. “That is boring, why would we want to be like every other marching band? That’s lame. We want to do our own stuff.”
Meredith Spelbring can be reached at [email protected]