thielenbrücke
A 6 Pack of beer and a small Bluetooth speaker was enough to spend the afternoon floating on the waters of the Landwehrkanal, the canal that separates the districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln in Berlin.
Paddling under the "Thielenbrücke" bridge we realised that the music we were listening to sounded amazing. The architectural and spatial characteristics of the bridge caused a unique acoustic phenomenon. We were so amazed that we decided to come back another day to make acoustic measurements of the bridge.
So we bought some balloons, and, after inflating the boat, we took to the water again to make the recordings.
With the balloons, a binaural microphone and a digital recorder, we recorded the "impulse response" (IR) under the bridge. We focused our recording points on two different locations that sounded remarkably different: In the centre of the bridge and near the walls.
And this is what we found...
Perception of the acoustic environment of an urban space
The acoustic environment of a physical space is the sound of all the sources that can be heard by someone in that place. This acoustic environment is made up of the spectral characteristics of the sound sources present and also the modification of these sounds as they propagate along their paths from the sources to the receiver/listener. This modification includes both the reflection and absorption of sound by any surfaces present, such as the ground or walls and the attenuation and refraction of sound along the path between the source and receiver as it passes through the atmosphere. In outdoor areas, there will often be only one reflective surface, that of the ground. In urban areas, there will also be reflections from walls and buildings. Often the space or place will have certain visual and other properties as part of its natural or man-made environment.
The acoustic environment of a place has also been called the sonic environment (Schafer 1997), sound environment (Yang and Kang 2005) or auditory architecture (Blesser and Salter 2007).
A person performing some activity in this place experiences auditory stimulation from the acoustic environment and interprets the auditory sensations derived from this stimulus.
The resulting perceptual construction of the acoustic environment can be called a soundscape.
The "soundscape of a place" is referred to as a person's perceptual construction of the acoustic environment of that place (Porteous and Mastin 1985; Truax 1999; Finegold and Hiramatsu 2003; Gage et al. 2004; Brown and Muhar 2004; Yang and Kang 2005; Dubois et al. 2006; Kang 2006).
In his book Sensuous Geographies (1994), Paul Rodaway defines soundscape not only as a state of being with respect to the sound of the environment but also as an experiential process and an auditory engagement with the environment that continually changes with the way we interact. Being in a soundscape is a bodily experience in which the body itself resonates with the environment, situating itself in the landscape and connecting the human being with the environment.
History and characteristics of the Thielenbrücke bridge
The Thielenbrücke is a bridge in the Berlin district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, on the border with the district of Neukölln. It is located at kilometre 9.23 over the Landwehrkanal and connects the Pannierstraße in Neukölln with the Glogauerstraße in Kreuzberg. The bridge was built between 1915 and 1917 and is now a protected construction. The name refers to the Prussian Minister of Public Works Karl Von Thielen.
The bridge was built with a reinforced concrete structure and covered with Franconian shell limestone (Muschelkalk). Designed as a basket arch, the bridge provided clearance for ships in the Landwehr Canal of 3.0 metres over a width of 10.0 metres. Construction began in 1915 but completion was delayed due to the war until 1917.
When, at the end of World War II, many bridges were blown up to stop the advance of Soviet troops, the Thielenbrücke bridge was saved, despite the fact that the neighbouring Hobrechtbrücke bridge was "wrecked". This fact gave Thielenbrücke a special significance in the early post-war period.
Discovering the acoustic of the Thielenbrücke
In mid-July 2018, to celebrate a friend's birthday, we decided to take a ride on an inflatable boat on Berlin's beautiful Landwehrkanal. After a while, as we passed under the Thielenbrücke bridge, we were surprised to find that one of our favourite songs sounded amazingly good with just a 12 euro Bluetooth speaker. Listening more closely, we realised that there was something about the architecture and materiality of the bridge that added wonderful reverb and colour to our playlist. We left the bridge after a couple of songs, but after paddling for a couple of minutes, we were determined to go back there and spend more time under the bridge, indeed, we were also determined to return another day to do acoustic measurements on it. We wanted to take these acoustics with us.
What would happen to the acoustics of the bridge if it disappeared in the future? What would happen if it was remodelled with a different architecture? Or if the water dried up and the bridge was no longer needed in the future? All these scenarios are enough to understand the purpose of our intention.
The exercise of recording the soundscape of the bridge, or of any place, goes beyond the mere process of rescuing the acoustics to play your favourite music. It is about putting the emphasis on listening, on the perception of space and safeguarding the acoustics of places that are capable of generating meaning.
One of the most important challenges for us was the attempt to convey our experience of that day. How to talk about and show the importance of urban acoustics, representing this phenomenon in a simple way?
So we decided to create a context, a situation that is familiar to us, in a certain place and at a certain time.
Thielenbrücke Music Festival 2025
To deepen the historical value of the Thielenbrücke's sonorities and to place them in an artistic context, we have decided to make the "Thielenbrücke Music Festival 2025".
In the age of the immediate, in which progress and processes such as gentrification are difficult to understand because of the speed at which they occur, the "Thielenbrücke Music Festival 2025' asks the following question: What happens to urban soundscapes defined by architectural elements in the event of their disappearance?
Through a process called convolution auralisation, this project rescues the acoustic characteristics of this architecturally exquisite bridge. But not only that, this festival takes us to the year 2025: For various reasons the bridge no longer exists, however, and thanks to the preservation of its sound characteristics, the "Thielenbrücke Music Festival 2025" can be organised. In this, different musicians will play and allow the audience using only these acoustics. Rediscovering the extraordinary richness of sound that once existed under this historic bridge.
This project was presented in 2019 at Prachtwerk as part of the 48 Std Neukölln festival.
