Close your eyes and think of your favorite place in Cincinnati. We know you know what it looks like, but what does it sound like? Maybe you’re at Great American Ball Park and you can hear the roar of the crowd and the announcer as Elly De La Cruz hits a home run. Maybe you’re at Findlay Market and can hear the chatter of hundreds of people, the rustling of shopping bags and vendors filling orders and ringing up customers. Maybe you’re in a quieter spot: your favorite park, sitting and listening to the birds and wind moving through trees.
Every place is an amalgamation of its interwoven sensory experiences — the sights, smells, textures, flavors and, of course, sounds making every space different. And where there’s sound, there’s the potential for music. That’s where Play Audio Agency comes in.
A team at this local audio agency — which recently worked on the music for the projection mapping on Music Hall at this year’s BLINK festival — is on a mission to capture the unique sounds of the Queen City through its new multimedia series, PLAY IT. And this team, made up of sound designer and composer Drew Marcum, project director Ann Driscoll and creative director Adam Pleiman, is starting with one of the city’s most iconic landmarks: The Roebling Bridge. (We know the sound of that very specific hum just popped into your head.)
“I mean, sound is how we experience these places,” Driscoll told CityBeat. “They get woven into the fabric of our memories and are connections to these landmarks and kind of create a sonic postcard.”
Play has done projects like this in the past for clients and brands, but never for the public. Marcum explained that much of their work can’t be shared or can’t be shared for a long time, and the PLAY IT series is a way to show the public what they do as an agency, but also serves as a fun and creative outlet for them.
“The reason I think we’ve liked this idea as a group the most is because we went, ‘Oh, cool! We can actually, for the first time in a long time, talk about sound and music in a way where people might understand what we do … but not in a like, ‘I’m going to go sell this!’ It’s like, no, let’s make something that will just be nice to make,” said Pleiman.
“Yeah, it’s a piece of public infrastructure and we’re sharing it with the public,” added Driscoll. “And the other cool thing about the Roebling Bridge is that it’s this masterpiece of technology and artistry, and that’s what we’re trying to accomplish with our work is being innovative, but also being artistic.”
The Roebling was an obvious choice for the test run of this project. As the team was talking about launching this project, Pleiman, who drives over the bridge every day, was the first to suggest it. The hum it makes as cars drive over is distinct — its low, constant metallic whir that echoes from one side of the Ohio River to the other is something that many in Greater Cincinnati could pick out of a sonic lineup if needed. And, as Driscoll said, anything can be an instrument.
There’s no written rulebook for how the team creates the music from these iconic places, but there is one main rule: the sounds have to be recorded at the location, and the team can’t add anything else to them. The “instruments” you hear in the finished product all belong to the bridge: the hum of cars on the metal grates, the cables, the vertical uprights of the pedestrian walkway combine to create the music.
“Literally everything we made this out of was the bridge,” Marcum said.
The team went to the bridge on a warm day a few months ago and spent two hours shooting video and creating the sounds that would eventually be mixed into the track. Handheld microphones picked up the sounds of cars going by and contact microphones captured the resonance of the inner workings of the bridge as the crew hit certain parts with drumsticks, providing more low-frequency elements.
Capturing the hum of the bridge was the team’s main mission, but from there, they wanted to experiment with the sounds.
“It was like, let’s just gather as much as we can, film it all, record it all and then we’ll go back and slice it up and see what happens there,” said Pleiman. “Really, the ideas kind of start to come together when you’re there. Like, you hit this one thing, you hit this cable, and that’s a kick! It’s nice and deep and it’s got a thud to it.”
After the raw sounds of the bridge were recorded, it was time to turn them into music. The challenge would be to create something people would want to listen to while still maintaining the authentic sounds of the Roebling.
“You want it to sound like the thing you’re recording. Like, you want to hear the car driving over the bridge and the sound. That’s what we kept having to remind ourselves of. Because the tech exists for us to just make this sound nothing like what we recorded, so we wanted to keep some semblance of the bridge in there,” Marcum said.
“Drew mangled [the sounds]. We both went and built out synths; we’ve all played with the sounds and you figure out what you can and can’t use,” Pleiman said. “We did resonant things to build the chords out of. So, you have to kind of like play around … if it’s just going to be a percussive piece, sure you can find that all day by hitting things, but what’s tough is to find all the others — something that you can make a chord, something that you can make resonate, something that has a tail. How do you take certain sounds and use them and extend them? Because we don’t want to have to mangle them too much.”
The finished track does capture the sounds of the Roebling. You can hear the distinct hum, the sound of drumsticks on cables; but it’s more than that. It has taken this everyday noise we know so well and turned it into music, turned it into something magical you can carry with you and see the bridge in a whole new light.
And the Play team is just getting started. The Roebling was a test run for the project, but they’re thinking ahead to other places in or near Cincinnati with unique sounds: airports, parks, breweries, structures.
“We have a bunch of ideas. We haven’t said no to many. And it’s just figuring out what the right next one is,” Pleiman explained. “I think moving forward, when we think of these spaces, it’s going to be that of: What are those iconic sounds? What are the sounds that make it unique? And how does it make you feel? And then making that piece that really illustrates that.”
You can listen to PLAY IT’s first episode on Play Audio Agency’s social media (@playaudioagency). The episodes will also be available on their music library and available to license.
Learn more about Play Audio Agency: playaudioagency.com.
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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 12, 2024.
