Sound Artist Jodi Rose Makes Bridges Sing

When the Golden Gate was built, the San Francisco Chronicle called it a thirty-five-million-dollar steel harp. Its chief engineer, Joseph B. Strauss, probably didn’t mind. In fact, he seemed to think so too, writing, “As harps for the winds of heaven / my weblike cables are spun.” Australia’s Glebe Island Bridge elicited a similar response in budding sound artist Jodi Rose. “When I was at art school in ’95, I would drive by the Glebe Island Bridge (Anzac Bridge) every day and it just looked like a giant harp to me.”

Being neither poet-engineer nor snarky newspaperman, Rose, who had recently been told to concoct a public art project without consideration for practicality, decided to see what the bridge actually sounded like. “Freedom of imagination is not a gift to be taken lightly,” she reflected. A recording ingénue, Rose “concocted a theoretical idea about bridges and networks” (these thoughts have since sprawled into rather impressive journals), thereby enlisting the help of radio ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation).

“I had no idea what to imagine. It was a little nerve-wracking. I had all this fairly heavy-duty equipment coming up there with me and I thought, ‘Oh no, what if there’s no sound?’ And then I thought, ‘Well, that doesn’t matter, it’s an experiment really.’”

Using small, round contact microphones pressed directly onto the cables, Rose amplified their creaks, moans, sighs, and songs. “There were all these pows and pops—it was amazing,” she recalls. The Singing Bridges project was born, and she’s been listening ever since.

In her bridge recording travels, she’s spanned the globe, a journey tracing the network of bridges linking cities, countries, and continents: from her native Australia to the My Thuan Bridge over the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, to the Erasmus Bridge in the Netherlands. 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.

Other artists and musicians have also taken forays into the world of bridges—in 2006, sound artist Bill Fontana, known for his “found music” approach, used vibration sensors to capture the sounds of the Millennium Bridge in London, which were then transmitted to a room in the Tate Modern. Composer Joseph Bertolozzi is in the process of (literally) banging out a symphony on the mid-Hudson bridge in New York. Most stay only briefly, but since that enchanting day on the Glebe Island, Rose hasn’t strayed.

“There’s something about the scale of my obsession that sets it apart,” she laughs. “People often ask about other architectural objects, but really, I just have this one fixation.”

Bridge Music
Rose shaped the Glebe Island’s pows and pops into a 4-track mix for ABC radio (it would later turn up in Alessio Cavallaro’s Sounds in Space Audioteque at Australia’s MCA). “I try to choose parts that are interesting and representative of each bridge,” says Rose. “I’m always surprised every time I listen to a new bridge. Something I think is very funny is that bridges very often sound like the place they’re from. For example, Scandinavian ones make this kind of icy, tinkling noise.”

Her recordings, recently collected in Singing Bridges Vibrations: Variations (Sonic ArtStar), range from lightly edited field recordings to sophisticated ambient electronic remixes done by a cast of international musicians like Jacob Kirkegaard (Denmark), Gintas K (Lithuania), and Francisco Lopez (Spain). The collaborating artists meld and play with Rose’s material, twisting loops and repetitions, dance beats, and industrial rumbles out of her recordings.

She welcomes all companions on the journey to interpret, understand, and appreciate the music of bridges. When she talks about other bridge artists she is excited and supportive—even when their approaches appear entirely different from her own. (Such as Bertolozzi’s, which will cost an estimated $1.8 million and uses the mid-Hudson bridge as an über drum kit, hitting its road signs, cables, and towers with wooden dowels and rubber mallets. He recently told a New York Times reporter, “I only play big instruments.”)