Play The Golden Gate Bridge

“PLAY THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE” lets you, yes you, actually play the most famous bridge in the world.

The San Francisco Synthesizer Ensemble (SFSE) has created an App that lets you ‘strum’ or ‘pluck’ the Golden Gate Bridge and record the sounds as a piece of music. The “Play the Golden Gate Bridge” App uses sounds taken from various parts of the Bridge and its environs and presents them in a way that quickly allows anyone to turn the Bridge into a musical instrument.

Open it up and you can strum or pluck the ‘strings,’ start recording what you are doing, play it back and play along—create up to four layered parts of you PLAYING THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE, and PLAYING ALONG.

Each unique sound that SFSE captured, the Vertical Cables, the Guardrails, Light Stanchions, the sounds of the Cars passing over bumps, the crashing of the Waves below, the South Tower—even the Main Cable that holds the entire bridge up—become instruments at your fingertips allowing you to not only play, but to record and play along with up to four parts of music that you create.

The App screen shows an artist’s rendering of the Golden Gate Bridge featuring the ‘cables as strings’ to play the sounds by touching them – like the strings on a golden harp. At the heart of the App’s software engine is a powerful sequencer and a small ‘recording studio’ designed by software engineer, Gianluca Natalini of NGCYBIT Robotics in Italy, allowing the user to build a series of rhythms and tones and play along with them.

Also in the App are the actual recordings of the sounds of the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as the story of how this all came to be, many years ago, the mystery at midnight in 1975 involving the cops, the creation of the San Francisco Synthesizer Ensemble, The Suite of music the Ensemble created 25 years ago for the 50th Anniversary celebration of the Golden Gate Bridge and their new piece, “A Day in the Life of the Golden Gate Bridge,” for the 75th Anniversary.

Many of the sounds in the “Play the Golden Gate Bridge” App are the same ones used by the Synthesizer Ensemble to create their music for the Bridge’s 75th Anniversary.