161 seconds of an overpass sound installation in North Adams

On our day trip to North Adams last summer, when we cranked some cranks to spin some tubes, we also checked out a sound installation under the nearby Route 2 overpass. There’s a speaker under the bridge with some pretty neat sounds coming out of it:

To produce these rolling tones, artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger affixed two 16-foot tuning tubes to the guardrail on the north side of the bridge on either side of the overpass. The length of the tubes determines the fundamental tone: a sound wave at such a low pitch is 16 feet long and must be generated (whether for sound art or a pipe organ) with a 16-foot tube. Inside each tube, a microphone is placed at a certain harmonic interval (the 5th in one tube, the 4th in the other). These locations accentuate the harmonic and give a slightly different timbre to the two Cs. (source)

It was ominous.

Here is a picture I took of the underbelly of the underpass.