Business Owners Cooperating to Create Festive Main Street for Holiday Season

As the holidays near, Christmas lights are going up around Lincoln and along Main Street, the lights at several businesses will be coordinated to music.

Aaron Birkholz, owner of Coyote Coffee, has been working on synchronizing the lights at his business and home to music for the last couple of years. This year, he's working with other local businesses to try to light up the entire Main Street.

A few years ago, Birkholz started noticing elaborate Christmas light displays and wondered how they worked. He discovered a service that connects lights to music, creating a visual and auditory light display where the lights blink in time to the music. Birkholz purchased his own set, including a control box, an antenna, and software to get started.

Strings of Christmas lights are plugged into a control box, which has space for up to 16 light strings. A computer runs the music and light software, which tells each string of lights when to blink during a song, and sends this information wirelessly to the control box. The song is then broadcast either through speakers or on FM radio.

In Lincoln, you can hear the music outside via speakers at Coyote Coffee and the Sportsman Motel, or you can listen to the music on your car radio by tuning into 90.1 FM. When you combine all this together, you get an impressive light show that plays in time to the music. Birkholz has set the lights and music on a timer, so visitors can enjoy them from 4 p.m. - midnight each day.

Birkholz bought some preprogrammed songs early on, but each song with the light sequencing costs nearly $30, so he began programming his own. To do this, he programs each string of lights (16 in total) for every beat of a song. With most songs running about four minutes long and mid-tempo songs having 80 beats per minute or more, this is over 5,000 different blocks to program for each song. Birkholz said it takes him 8-10 hours to program a song, and that he currently has 10-12 songs that the lights cycle through.

So far, the Blackfoot Valley Dispatch, D&D Foodtown, and the Sportsman Motel plan to participate in the light display. Birkholz hopes other businesses or private residences along Main Street will join in.

To participate, businesses need to purchase a control box and antenna as well as have Christmas lights to string up. Businesses and residences can reach out to Birkholz for more information.