BRIDGE is a soundscape performance for Missouri river bridge sounds and Tibetan singing bowls. The sonorous Liberty Bend Bridge at Highway 291 (near Independence) is a magnificent traffic-activated instrument expressing a flow of people, materials, animals and plants. Its voice, animated by human agency and full of percussive and harmonic sound, is intimately heard by nestling an ear on its metal understructure (or attaching contact microphones as heard here).
The performance featured Tibetan singing-bowl master Steve Donofrio, composer Dwight Frizzell’s multi-channel bridge recordings, and students in Converging Media at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Bios
Steve Donofrio has been a Free-lance Audio Engineer & Technical Consultant for the past 38 years. For ten years he served as Technical Coordinator for Midwest Radio Theatre Workshop and its Executive Director for three more years. Steve is also a founding board member of the National Audio Theatre Festivals. As a member of The Deli Llama Orchestra Steve has played Tibetan Singing Bowls for over the past 30 years, playing on numerous studio and live recordings from LA to Katmandu, Nepal. Steve is an avid collector of Tibetan Sing Bowls using them as instilments of music and for meditative and tonal healing. Steve has worked on many musical CD projects as a producer, recoding & mixing engineer and audio artist. Currently Steve works at the Columbia Public Library as a technical support specialist and lives in rural Missouri with his wife, two dogs and a charm of 1000 hummingbirds.
Dwight Frizzell is an internationally recognized artist and soundscape composer who began recording environments, and playing with their acoustic imprints early on—a practice he calls Turtle Music—as heard on his 1976 LP, Beyond the Black Crack. The cultural complexities of place were further fore-fronted in Dwight’s Peabody-awarded Center of the World (1997), which features his childhood neighbor Harry S. Truman at the shopping center that leveled the Truman family farm in 1957.
More recently, Frizzell was panel moderator/presenter of Sounding Sculptural Space at the International Sculpture Conference with composer Robert Carl and long- string instrumentalist Ellen Fullman. Dwight’s teachers included Sun Ra and Douglas Davis. He earned a terminal degree in Sound Design for Theatre, and is currently Professor in Converging Media at KCAI. His From Ark to Microchip radio program can be heard every Wednesday at 11:30pm on KKFI-FM www.kkfi.org, and his soundscape music is available on Paradigm Discs.
Ron Achelpohl, PE is Director of Transportation and Environment at the Mid-America Regional Council, the council of governments and metropolitan planning organization for the bi-state Kansas City metropolitan area. Ron directs MARC’s transportation and environmental planning and policy work along with related implementation activities such as the Operation Green Light traffic signal coordination system, RideShare program and public education initiatives for air quality, water quality, active transportation and transportation safety. Prior to serving in his current role, Ron was an Assistant Director of Transportation at MARC, and before that held various positions with the Missouri Department of Transportation. Ron is a registered Professional Engineer with degrees in civil engineering from the University of Missouri and engineering management from the University of Kansas. He is an active member of the American Public Works Association, and serves on the boards of several local non-profit organizations.
