Sound Artist Jodi Rose Makes Bridges Sing
Compared to the musicians’ remixes, Rose’s pieces are much sparser, carefully selected and edited with few effects. You get the sense that she is listening very carefully, hesitant to obscure the songs of the bridge with musical manipulation. She also produces segments for ABC radio, which is unsurprising. She has the characteristics of an excellent interviewer—a combination of focused enthusiasm and intent listening that draws out even the most taciturn subject. It seems that if anyone is going to extract music from the secretive steel of a suspension bridge, it would be Jodi Rose.
And though the sounds of bridge cables are otherwise obtainable, “The frequency could be manufactured on any ordinary synthesizer,” admits Rose. Imitations are besides the point, for the project strives “not merely to hear, but to listen to what is really there.”
The Secret Life of Bridges
“The idea that their vibrations may contain some secret language, a hidden key…fascinates and excites me,” Rose writes. She cites the abstract filmmaker Oscar Fishinger: “Everything has a spirit, and that spirit can be released by setting whatever it is into vibration.”
Such ideas form the basis of architectural sound, a sub-genre of sound art that pushes architecture into new, and largely unexplored, aural territory. Architectural sound demands the consideration of environmental soundscapes, posits the possibility of sonic remnants, and argues that architectural spaces are greater than their structural components and visual imprints. And what better architectural space to explore than bridges, symbolic as they are of transformation, connection, and communication? “People have such an emotional resonance with bridges," says Rose. "They love them. They are outside of the realm of normal life. It puts you in kind of a dreamy state.”
Sometimes she is beckoned by engineers (Swedish engineer Pelle Gustavsson wanted to hear his bridge—the RAMA VIII in Bangkok—played like Jimi Hendrix), but mostly, it’s the bridges themselves that do all the beckoning.
Before my encounter with Singing Bridges, I too considered bridges dreamy, but in a more or less ho-hum kind of way. Like so many marvels (ocean sunsets, grazing elk, hot-air balloons), I’d been desensitized to their power and wonder by their frequent appearances in insurance calendars, travel brochures, and screen savers. Their picturesqueness was overwhelming, squelching alternate experiences or interpretations. I also live in a city—San Francisco—with one of the world’s most picturesque bridges, the Golden Gate. For me, traversing bridges was merely pretty, and if done by foot amid tourists, a little embarrassing.
Listening to Rose’s recording of the Golden Gate changed that. Both Rose’s original and Kirkegaard’s remix “Golden Resonance” are filled with tense, zinging pops offset by a deeper, somewhat ominous undertone. It’s oddly compelling but it makes me uneasy. I find that I want to turn it off and yet I can’t quite bring myself to do it. Listening, I remember the hypnotic feeling that surges up on crossings, watching the bay meet the swirling waters of the ocean and the dramatic arc of the brightly colored cables. For reasons unknown but much speculated upon (its abnormally low four-foot safety rail, or the irresistibility of its location at continent’s end, a quality New Yorker writer Tad Friend referred to as “fatal grandeur”), the Golden Gate is the world’s most popular suicide location.
“There is some awful tension to bridges that is kind of like a circus highwire,” says Rose. “You almost want them to fall to relieve the tension. I have a friend who has very bad vertigo and it’s a very eerie thing every time she drives over a bridge. She almost wants to drive over the edge just to relieve that tension.” Gephyrophobia, fear of bridges, is not an entirely uncommon problem. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland—a daunting 4.3 miles long—is so feared that the Maryland Transit Authority established a free program in which drivers could call ahead to have someone else drive their car over the bridge. It became so popular that the authority could no longer meet demand. (Two private companies now run the program; it is no longer free.)
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