Recording Barrandov
On a hot spring day, we went to collect sounds around the Barrandov bridge, equipped with all sorts of gear: a multichannel recorder for a four-cardioid capsule microphone, a hyper-cardioid, a binaural set, a contact microphone, and a geofón. The four-cardioid capsule and the hyper-cardioid were meant to capture the surroundings, the contact mic and the geofón for surfaces and sounds beyond human hearing.
We approached the bridge from the southeast Braník entrance that gives access to the pedestrian/bicycle path. As we walked down the bridge, we stopped at a few spots that we believed could provide a rich sound source. The first thing we heard was the overwhelming noise of the construction work happening on the road; its sounds contributed to the overall soundscape. Additionally, as fewer lanes were available due to the construction works, the traffic was denser, which also affected the soundscape.
We first recorded right next to the Rovnováha sculpture (Figure 3). We placed a contact microphone on the metal tube of the pedestrian traffic sign, another contact microphone onto the metal barrier fence next to the road, and next to it the geofón on a thicker metal tube coming out from the ground (Figure 4, location 1).
As the cars passed by endlessly and the constructors continued their work, we attached the contact microphone to the fence next to the walking path. As the fence hardly “contained” any sound – there was no input signal from the contact microphones or the geofón – we soon decided to stop recording (Figure 5).
We continued down the path and stopped at a concrete and metallic structure holding a road traffic sign (Blue Information Directions). It seemed this structure could provide some interesting resonances, and so we attached contact microphones to it and made some recordings.
A few weeks later we returned to the bridge to record it late at night. Most results were very similar, with a few exceptions: the traffic sign resonated differently (Figure 4, location 2), and we could hear crickets in the surroundings.
Down the path, we stopped at a kind of box embedded in the wall that held various cables and pipes. It seemed one was for water and another for electricity, and we deduced some control signals (Location 3 in Figure 4; Figure 6).
After that, we stopped at an expansion joint that runs across the whole bridge through the car tracks and the pedestrian/bicycle path (Figure 4, location 4). The metal edges of the expansion joint were rusty. Having placed microphones on the joint, we found that its rusty edges did not provide any resonance except in the case of a bigger part that reacted every time a car passed over it. We observed that the resonance is more present in the night recording due to the reduced number of passing cars.
From there, one of us went ahead with the four-capsule microphone, placing it in the middle platform of the staircase giving access to the secondary road, one level down. The others stayed behind to make a binaural recording of the walk from the top side of the road through those stairs. When we arrived downstairs, we encountered a semi-wild green space that had clearly been occupied by someone, judging from the traces of usage and some discarded items.
Once again, we attached the geofón and the contact microphone to a rusty thick metal tube. It was similar to the tube on the pedestrian traffic sign in the first position, but this one extended downwards. We also managed to insert the hyper-cardioid microphone in it (Figure 7).
This field recording trip lasted approximately five hours. It was a very hot day, and we became physically exhausted. Needless to say, our exhaustion was not comparable to that of the construction workers spending the whole day in full sunlight in the middle of the road, surrounded by constant loudness. With this in mind, any complaints on our side feel frivolous; however, mentioning them gives us the chance to address the health threats that these kinds of professions pose to their workers. Many professions should be (re)addressed when considering workers’ wellbeing in relation to sonic impact, as identified above in the EEA report.
Even without the construction work, the location we studied is notable for its “critical” ambient sound levels. The Strategic Noise Map from 2022 shows calculations that are clearly above the levels recommended by WHO’s European Region in 1995 (Figures 8, 9, and 10).
Evidently, “noise health” is not necessarily a concern to these workers or their employers.[4] One could argue, however, that the damage to workers’ auditory systems is intrinsically related to the damage to the planet’s ecosystem, of which humans are only a small part. Subsequently it seems important to disclose all these other sounds to which humans are oblivious but which, nonetheless, contribute to the saturation of the environment.
It is easy to look at a big factory and think about the impact of constant exposure to loud sounds […] but that is precisely why FR [Field Recordings] can and should be extended to any location, because every location is worth exploring. In order for sound to protect us, we need to listen to what is around us. (Pinheiro 2022: 144)
Our field recordings revealed a whole spectrum that we do not recognize as sound or that is not audible to the human ear. In particular, the subsonic frequencies – those below human range of hearing – were incredibly active and contained vast amounts of sonic information in our recordings. We were not aware of these frequencies while recording, especially in Barrandov, both because there was a limited range in the headphones and because the “direct sources” were so loud that they ended up masking the whole experience on-site. It was only when playing back the sounds that we could notice their presence in the content of the recordings. In the recordings made with the geofón, in particular, some of the information was not audible to our ears but visible in the loudspeaker, which began shaking during playback.
It became clear to us that when the ear is oblivious to sound this does not mean that there are no sounds, because “our human ears are just one way of listening” (Haskell 2022: 7). Even if the ear does not translate information into audible data, the body may sense it. According to Reybrouck, Podlipniak and Welch,
high levels of low-frequency noise can excite vibrations in the human body, particularly the chest region, which resonates in the range of 50–80-Hz; there is also a 30–40-Hz resonant frequency response for the forehead and face and a 80–90-Hz frequency response for the back of the skull frequency response for the forehead and face and a 80–90-Hz frequency response for the back of the skull. (Reybrouck, Podlipniak and Welch 2019: 4)
They further explain that
most of the organs and viscera resonate most strongly around 5 Hz. This does not mean, however, that there is no feeling of vibration as the human body is sensitive to vibrations from 0.5 to 100 kHz, with the frequencies between 0.5 and 200 Hz as the most intrusive ones. This means that the felt vibrations from the lower frequencies may influence to some extent the haptic-tactile perception of low-frequency sounds as well as our subjective reaction to these sounds. [...T]wo classes of sensations seem to be possible candidates here: vibrotactile and vestibular ones. (Reybrouck, Podlipniak and Welch 2019: 4-8)
In other words, we hear with the whole body, even if the ear is not translating that information into electric impulses for the brain to interpret it as audio. More importantly, other species do not share the human unawareness of audible information outside the range of 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Thus, “to hear is a verb that reveals the narrowness of our sonic perceptions and imaginations” (Haskell 2022: 18). In a manner of speaking, hearing can therefore also be regarded as a category of sound just like noise. SHLUK’s noise performances elaborate on this conception by playing with boundaries of what is “understandable information,” “music,” and an abstraction of both.
