1999
Max Neuhaus, Suspended Sound Line, 1999

The Suspended Sound Line, as the sound portion of the footbridge is titled, is a recent work by Max Neuhaus, an artist who has spent the last four decades exploring sound and the listening potential outside the parameters of music or language. The invisible electronic sound sources were installed during the bridge’s construction, and Neuhaus used them to create sonorities with his ears tuned to existing local sounds, a process in which his intuitive skills intimately merge with accumulated practice.

Suspended Sound Line Invite (Front)

Max Neuhaus' drawing for Suspended Sound Line has a text which sounds / reads like a haiku, in its combination of simplicity and suggestion:

A footbridge

lined with

Sound

Partitioned into

abutting regions

Alternating

sound entities

Reciprocating

open with dense

Tension with relaxation

Another walk across this bridge. Because it is outside, because it is so seamlessly integrated into the sounds of the city, of the neighborhood, one wonders where the sound is coming from. It is a part of the structure; it is a 'footbridge lined with sound', as if the sound was another element of construction, like steel and concrete.

Michael Tarantino

Michael Tarantino, Two Passages, Contradiction / Dislocation / De Passage Between, Oxford,December 1998: https://www.max-neuhaus.estate...

Suspended Sound Line Invite (Back)