We’ve been working for quite a few months now on creating the most amazing installation, which is going to be on the Millennium Bridge during the Olympics. It’s called Tales From The Bridge, which is a combination of ambient sound and an electronic soundscape which we composed together with a fantastic poetic kind of magic realist overlay of spoken word in three dimensions, which is going to be drifting across the bridge. You’ll be able to experience this just by walking across the bridge in 3D, it’ll be immersing you for the whole length of the bridge, which is about 350 metres.

We’re going to spread his three and a half thousand voices that he’s sampled online, where he’s got the different choruses across the world from 90 different countries, to sing into their laptops while he conducts them and then he’s assembled this amazing piece called Water Night, which is currently number one I think in the classical charts in America, and we’re going to spread it across the bridge so it sounds like, if you were blind, it would sound like three thousand people were spread across the bridge, singing this amazing choral piece, as part of it.

We did a piece called Timepiece, which we composed for the Mexico City installation that we did, Sound Oasis, and this was composed of very slowly-drifting chords that changed almost imperceptibly in related keys, over an hour-long loop, and I thought it would be quite nice to use a similar structure but change the sounds and make it more adapted to the kind of environment here. So that’s the basic musical element, plus some additional, inspirational kind of almost like Blade Runner-ish synth, virtual synths. So we used a lot of Omnisphere.

Spectrasonics Omnisphere 1.5 We used a lot of Omnisphere Read More

We used a lot of virtual synths including Moog Modular Arturia synth, Korg MS20, and some Roland System 100 as well. So that’s the basic template of what we did, and it’s slowly drifting, additional kind of Vangelis-type melody lines that weave in space and time around the piece as well. And then overlaid with the fantastic script. I suppose you’d call it poetry, but it’s really as much prose as poetry, that Mario Petrucci has written, and performed by a couple of actors with beautiful voices called Mia Austen and Steven Alexander.

The idea was to relate the lyrical content at this end of the bridge to the City and the Church and government, and on the other side to the theatre and the playground of the rich, even though it was a poor area historically, and the arts, and recreation. And the central section of the bridge, compositionally, is about the history of the Thames itself.

The idea of it is to get a general idea of footfall in different parts of the bridge, and to make those parts of the bridge sound a little more active. It’s quite subtle, but the idea is that everybody who’s on the bridge is by default participating in the creation of the soundscape.

They’re not physically different from any other speakers, because the processing all goes on in our 3D Audioscape software, so it’s just standard full-range speakers. There are no subs (subwoofers). We had a potential problem with assessing noise levels, because obviously sub travels more than anything else, and there are some residential areas nearby including the Globe Theatre and they were worried about their performances getting interrupted, because they are unamplified, I believe. So we kind of guaranteed there aren’t any sudden noises, very little in terms of very low frequencies that’s going to travel, there’s no infrasound. It’s quite an interesting challenge, all this.

d&b Audiotechnik E3 Speakers Compact high-output speaker Read More

What happened, very naturally it seemed, was a piece of work that allowed lots of space for Martyn and David to work with, to allow the musical elements their space, to allow the evolution of the piece musically, but for the individual texts also to stand their ground and to make very quick statements about what they’re representing.

You’ve got to start with the richness of the historical associations of the river. Just take one small example, the economic traffic up and down, imports, exports, that provides quite a lot of this poem, just in terms of lists of what came upriver, down river during Roman occupation, Vikings, Tudor times, Victorian times, during the wars, during the plague and so on. All these elements of the material movement of substances up and down the river, tell a story in their own right. And it’s stuff like that that is absolutely teeming with meaning and value, sonic value, that was a thing that surprised me, that these lists of facts and information were actually sonically very interesting once they’d been slightly moulded, they fell into a sonic shape.

In an ideal world, if I could, I’d like the piece to be remembered as something that inspired a few people to think about sound art seriously in cities. But also, you know, I’d love, sooner or later somebody’s going to commission a piece that’s permanent, on a bridge or in a city centre somewhere and I’d love it if they turned around and said, do you know what? We like this so much we’d like to have it in for a year or five years or whatever, you know. Because I think we live in an experiential environment, it’s not just about the bricks and mortar and what we see, it’s about our environment soundwise as well and I think we can beautify the sound environment.

Arturia Modular V We used a lot of virtual synths including Moog Modular Arturia synth Read More

Roland System-100 (One of ) my two favourites Read More

Korg MS-20 Vintage portable analog monosynth - a real gem Read More

Apple Logic Pro Logic is my workhorse Read More