Field Recording as Research
In responding to Turner’s invitation, and to create Hladiny, we first decided to record silent spaces, starting with our own domestic environments at a supposedly quiet period. Besides discovering how quiet our own dwellings actually are and what could be heard when we were supposed to hear little, the main goal was to inform our definitions of noise and clarify our creative goals. As the SHLUK members have completely different domestic environments, we thought that would provide us with a range of results to contemplate.
The recordings were somewhat sterile. We tried to analyze them in different ways but, perhaps due to their emptiness, we observed a tendency to process them heavily and to deviate from the initial idea of merely listening to them.
To obtain a contrasting data set, we thought of recording the Barrandov Bridge, because it is the busiest road intersection in the city and the most used entrance to Prague. It is also a diverse habitat with a loaded cultural history, which will be discussed below. Eventually, the Barrandov region became the central point of our study, not only because the majority of the recordings come from there but also because it defined the next steps of our research. Besides leading us to the Hladiny event, it also inspired us to collect sounds from two other bridges in Prague, in Nusle and Vyšehrad.
Nusle
The Nuselsky Bridge was inaugurated in 1973. It is a prestressed concrete construction of 485 meters long and 25 meters wide, and its average height is 42.5 meters over the Nusle valley. The bridge supports a two-way six-lane highway, and it also includes a metro line, which makes it the busiest bridge in the city. On average, around 300,000 people cross this bridge by metro, and more than 30,000 cars pass every day. The inner pace and metro rails were constructed for specific train parameters, but additional structural components had to be installed to better spread the weight across the bridge, because different trains than those it was originally designed for were eventually used for transport.
Nuselsky Bridge became a common suicide location, and around 300 people ended their lives there. In response, a big metal fence with a slippery overhang was added to the sidewalks on both sides (see Figure 2 – to the left – and Sound File #2). Although we were very fond of this fence sound, the rest of the recordings are heavily based on traffic.
Vyšehrad
The Vyšehrad railway bridge was built in 1872 and rebuilt in 1902. It is 298 meters long and 9 meters wide. It was built as a part of a bigger scheme to connect disparate railway stations and to allow cargo trains to pass through the city. At first, it was used only as a path for cargo, later becoming important for public transport. It is a two-way railway bridge realized as an iron construction based on concrete pillars with sidewalks on both sides. The structure of the bridge is in disrepair, and there is extensive debate over its future. There is a citizen movement trying to save the construction from being destroyed, defending repair instead of demolition and characterizing the bridge as an architectural heritage. As Figure 2 (to the right) shows, we have placed the geofón and the contact microphone on one of its pillars.[1] We hoped to hear more of the structure of the bridge itself, given its iron structure. Resonances, however, would happen only when the trains or the pedestrians were very close to the microphones. Nonetheless, the combination of both microphones made audible very specific characteristics of this iron structure.
Barrandov
The Barrandov area is a case of its own and requires further contextualization. It is a relatively young neighborhood in Prague. Named in 1928 after the 18th-century French geologist and paleontologist, Joachym Barrande, it is a tribute to his detailed geological study of the Bohemian region. Barrandov was conceived by construction entrepreneur Václav Maria Havel in the 1930s, whose urban conception included the Barrandov terraces, a complex including a restaurant and a swimming pool.
The whole Barrandov region is a broad geographical area that comprises the panel housing and the bridge (both from the 1980s) and some film studios that have existed there since the 1930s. Despite the higher crossing and passenger numbers at Nusle Bridge, the Barrandov bridge is currently the busiest traffic point in the city.
Declared a national heritage in 1982, the Barrandov area is the oldest geologically important protected area in the Czech Republic. Specifically the Barrandov rocks, under the bridge, are of significance. These steep rocks are shaped by erosion processes, for which the river is a dominant agent, as well as by the human interventions of railway construction and mining. In one disused quarry, a swimming pool was later built. The interventions in the naturally shaped rocks revealed sediments and layers that are extremely informative and important for paleontology and paleogeography (Röhlich 2008): during the Silurian geological period, the whole area was located in the earth's southern hemisphere, under the sea and volcanically active. When considered geologically, this rocky area – marked and defined anthropogenically nowadays with materials like asphalt, iron, plastics, and concrete – becomes more fluid, gradual, or processual. In the next geological period, residual parts from all contemporary constructions will inevitably create new sediment layers somewhere else around the world.
The Barrandov rocks and related residential areas are unique because of their rocky steppes that are inhabited by protected and endangered species: plants such as the Anthericum liliago, Rhodax canus, and Seseli osseum; rare snails (Granaria frumentum); and a few locally rare insects (Pupilla sterri, Panagaeus bipustulatus andHarpalus serripes). These areas are susceptible to invasive species. One of the most significant is the Robinia pseudoacacia, which threatens to overgrow the steppes. Most of the area is populated by secondary vegetation introduced by humans for hillside reinforcement. Another, and possibly the most significant, threat is human influence. These elements became important to us when devising Hladiny, because we sought to give the environment the opportunity to be mutually generative in the creation of our work.
Besides the bridge and the traffic, there are also a few sculptures in the area, which became points of interest for our field recordings. Rovnováha (Balance) by Josef Klimeš is a mixture of brutalism and minimalism and has become a symbol of the bridge and its context (Figure 3). This 15-meter-wide and 6-meter-tall structure, made of concrete, represents the schism of this era. Klimeš commented that, at that time, the sculpture made both the communists and the opposition angry: the former thought it was a waste of concrete, the latter considered it to be boasting communist power.
No study, however, has yet focused on the influence of the railway, highway, and Barrandov bridge-related noise or the light and air pollution on these habitats or on non-human life in this area.[2]
