The Golden Gate Bridge was silent for 83 years. Silent against the wind, silent under the weight of millions of travelers. Until one day in June 2020, when it started to sing.

The loud, eerie hum emitting from the bridge took San Francisco by surprise. Everyone wanted to know: what was this sound? What was causing it? Today on Abridged: a sonic investigation into what happens when our built world gets a voice of its own.

Abridged is produced, sound designed, and mixed by Rebecca Seidel. The executive producers are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolski at Goat Rodeo.

Learn more about Emily Shaw on her website, and listen to her new podcast Candy Ears here. One episode features her full recording of the Golden Gate Bridge hum; you can hear that here.

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Follow Becca on Twitter and get in touch if you have a bridge story of your own: abridged.xyz

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“The bridges are always singing. The music inside them is always playing.”

Jodi Rose has been deeply listening to bridges around the world for more than 20 years. She records them using contact microphones, which pick up and amplify the vibrations inside solid objects. By attaching a contact microphone directly to a bridge’s cables, she can hear its inner monologues—vibrations that are always there, but ever changing.

Jodi laces her recordings into musical compositions, attuning us to the ways different bridges move and sway. Listening to her music is a meditative experience—one that might make you rethink the way you look at (and listen to) the bridges around you. 

And what’s motivated Jodi to travel the world listening to bridges? Well, if it isn’t clear already, she loves them. A lot.

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Listen to more of Jodi’s music here.

The episode artwork is titled “Future Bridge Score.” It’s by Jodi Rose in collaboration with AI VQGAN + CLIP (Nightcafe). It was made as part of “Singing Bridges 360: Sculpting a Bridge in Sound,” Jodi’s piece imagining bridges around the world singing in harmony.

Abridged is produced, sound designed, and mixed by Rebecca Seidel. The executive producers are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolski at Goat Rodeo.

Subscribe to Abridged and tell a bridge-loving friend: https://www.abridged.xyz/

Follow Becca and get in touch if you have a bridge story of your own: twitter.com/beccahope24

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A swarm of army ants is a sight to behold. Thousands upon thousands of ants band together to create massive foraging highways, spanning hundreds of meters and preying upon everything in their path. Individually, these ants can’t do much. But together, they barrel through all kinds of obstacles—and, in a feat that’s truly surreal to witness, they build bridges out of their own bodies.

What do scientists know about these living, breathing structures? What motivates these ants to build them? And at the risk of getting way too metaphorical about the whole thing: what can ant bridges teach us about ourselves?

Abridged is produced, sound designed, and mixed by Rebecca Seidel. The executive producers are Ian Enright and Megan Nadolski at Goat Rodeo.

Today’s episode features Helen McCreery, who is now a full-time lecturer at Tufts University; and Albert Kao, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Both of them have done fascinating research on collective behavior.

Subscribe to Abridged and tell a bridge-loving friend: https://www.abridged.xyz/

Follow Becca and get in touch if you have a bridge story of your own: twitter.com/beccahope24

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.