Several months ago, Di Mainstone, a British artist, filmed a woman walking onto the Clifton Suspension Bridge, which stretches more than seven hundred feet across the Avon Gorge in Bristol, England. The woman wore a cream faux-leather cape, sewn late the night before, and she carried a blue bag on the end of a long pole.
In the middle of the bridge, the woman opened the bag to reveal a cache of objects, including a wireless speaker and a stethoscope, which she draped around her neck. She then approached each of the bridge's wrought-iron suspension rods. Clanging them with a metal tine, she leaned in to listen, holding up the stethoscope as though each resonating note were a heartbeat: C, F, A, G. When the woman found a rod with a particularly pleasing sound, she set about attaching other equipment to the bridge, lifted from the kit bag: a “bridge-bow,” resembling the spokes of a wheel, which would spin around and strike the suspension rod with rubber balls, and a “digi-bow,” which would capture the resonance digitally and then enable her to manipulate it using a string. The woman pulled the string out of the “digi-bow,” hooked it to her costume, and began to move about in a floaty, Kate Bush kind of way. In Mainstone’s film, she plucks and caresses, dips and twists: sound radiates outward in an unearthly trill. She is “playing” the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a moving musician—a “Movician,” Mainstone calls her.
The name of this instrument is the Human Harp, and while the film is partly conceptual—its soundtrack is manufactured from a mix of sources, including audio from the bridge enhanced with recordings of Tibetan throat singers—it nevertheless represents serious intentions. For the past few years, Mainstone, an artist-in-residence at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London, has been working on what she calls “a parasitical or clip-on interface,” or a “sonic sculpture,” which is capable of turning suspension bridges into giant sources of music.
As part of her research-and-development process, Mainstone has experimented with the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge in Omaha, Nebraska, which produced “a beautiful zapping noise,” she says, like “Star Wars” lasers. She has experimented with Tower Bridge, in London, which made “the sort of sound that would make your ears bleed, static and screechy.” She has experimented with the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York City, including a movement test using modified dog leads for strings. Currently, she is organizing a road trip across America—a “mobile laboratory,” during which she will test and refine the Human Harp prototype on bridges and other structures all the way to the West Coast. “Imagine a farmer playing a giant grain silo in Idaho,” Mainstone says. “Or a musical old lady playing a wind turbine in Colorado!” Her ultimate goal is to release the Human Harp as an open-source design, allowing others to build their own version of the instrument so they can play any resonant structure in the world, from a submarine to the Eiffel Tower.
Mainstone describes her work as “avant-garde theatre with this strange digital thing going on,” and it combines fashion, in which she was trained at Central Saint Martins, with technology and the conceptual-art-style “happening.” “Skorpions,” for example, involves a padded garment threaded with nitinol wires; when a performer wears the garment, electrical currents pulse through the wires to make them contract, making the dress writhe like a sentient creature. In “Serendiptichord,” made in collaboration with the artist Tim Murray-Browne, a dancer dons a head prosthetic studded with sound-activating sensors: the body literally becomes the instrument.
The Human Harp first occurred to Mainstone in 2009, when she was a resident at the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, in Chelsea. Scouting the city for new ideas, Mainstone found herself standing on the Brooklyn Bridge “over and over again,” she recalls. There was something “comforting” about the bridge—its “Alice in Wonderland scale.” She sat down near one of the granite towers, pulled out a sketchpad, and began to draw the wooden promenade (so like a xylophone, she thought at the time) and the high-tension wire cables fanning overhead (so like a harp, waiting to be played).
“I feel like a bridge is a place where anybody could belong, somehow,” Mainstone says. “It lifts you above and out of everything.” The Brooklyn Bridge was conceived by its engineer, John Augustus Roebling, as a piece of civic art, and it has inspired dozens of artists before Mainstone, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Walker Evans to Charles Simic. Hart Crane’s “To Brooklyn Bridge” includes the lines: “Oh harp and altar, of the fury fused, / (How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)”
In the six years since her first sketches of a woman connecting with the bridge, Mainstone has managed to enlist the enthusiastic support of industrial engineers, audio researchers, physicists, software designers, university departments, and Andy Cavatorta, the inventor of Björk’s Gravity Harp. “She’s showing me pictures of bridges and it’s like she’s showing me porn,” Cavatorta told me, recalling a meeting at Mainstone’s studio in London. “She’s excited and she’s whispering, ‘Look at this one,’ like this is some weird guilty pleasure of hers.”
A fetish for bridges is something I can understand: several years ago, while living on the edge of Chinatown, I often found myself wandering onto the Brooklyn Bridge whenever I was struggling with a piece of writing. And later, subletting in Washington Heights, I would stroll to the base of the George Washington Bridge, then peer up at its vast underbelly spanning the Hudson River to New Jersey. Somehow, simply being near these structures produced a sensation largely lacking from my daily routine. It was awe, what Edmund Burke memorably defined as “tranquility shadowed with horror.”
Clifford Zink, author of “The Roebling Legacy,” was an early consultant for Mainstone on the history of the Brooklyn Bridge. When I asked Zink about this familiar sensation, he at first responded by describing the distinctive form and length of suspension bridges that makes them sublime: “They are the biggest, the most monumental, so of course our eyes are going to be drawn to them.” And then he drifted around to musical analogies—a vertical piano, or a giant harp, like the one Mainstone had imagined. It was as though music, that nonverbal expression of thought and emotion, was the easiest mode for confronting such things.
Not long ago, speaking over Skype, Mainstone sent me an audio file that she described as “the voice of the Brooklyn Bridge.” The recording was made in 2013, several months after the bridge’s hundred and thirtieth anniversary, when Mainstone walked onto the pedestrian promenade with Andy Cavatorta and several others, armed with a stethoscope, padded hammers, and piezo pickups, which are capable of detecting tiny vibrations. (Pickups transform an electric guitar from a solid lump with strings into a musical instrument). At first Mainstone moved around listening to different surfaces with the stethoscope. “Bridge pervert!” she called herself, laughing. Then she crouched down and began thwacking a hammer against one of the cables, while Cavatorta applied pickups to the wire casing just above. Cable vibrations, captured digitally, were far below the range of normal human hearing, though some post-production tweaking on a computer had fixed that.
Mainstone rhapsodized about the enhanced recording, calling it “gorgeous and dark … kind of befitting a bridge of that scale and age.” Finally hearing it had validated the entire project for her. “Okay, this is all right,” she recalled thinking. “We can keep going.”
At the end of our conversation, Mainstone returned to work in London, and I grabbed a pair of headphones and took the subway down to City Hall, wanting to hear the recording in its proper place. It was a cool day; hoards of tourists were swaddled against wind blowing off the East River. I walked up the ramp past vendors selling hot dogs and knishes. Cyclists dodged people using emergency maneuvers. When I made it to the first tower, cables surrounding me, I leaned against the balustrade, put on the headphones, and cued Mainstone’s track on my smartphone.
What does the Brooklyn Bridge actually sound like? The recording is a sustained, rumbling whistle, like a finger run around the rim of a wine glass in a deep cave. As music, it’s mysterious, even unsettling; a soundtrack of New York as conceived by Angelo Badalamenti. While listening at the source, the city seems to become a vast, unruly orchestra, the skyscrapers like pipes and the bridge its vibrating centerpiece. After a few repeats, I reached out and touched one of the ropes that cross the bridge’s wire cables, thinking of something else that Clifford Zink told me: “What the ropes are doing is moving gravity from one place to another. You can feel it. You can hear them.”
You can listen to Mainstone's recording of the Brooklyn Bridge here:
