A Sound Walk Along the Ring Road

Every city I have lived in has a ring road, and I had never walked along one. You are not supposed to. They are built for cars, and the spaces beside them, the verges, the underpasses, the footbridges that nobody uses, are built for nobody at all. In June I decided to walk the whole of the southern half of the ring road in Copenhagen, fourteen kilometres, with a pair of microphones clipped to my collar, and record everything.

The finished piece runs to fifty-two minutes. It is edited but not rearranged: you hear the walk in the order it happened, from a little after seven in the evening until the last light.

What you will hear

Traffic, of course. But traffic is not one sound. On the recording you can hear it change with the surface of the road, with the speed limit, with the height of the barrier between the carriageway and the verge. On the long straight stretches it becomes a kind of ocean, a steady roar that the ear stops hearing after a few minutes. At the junctions it breaks up into individual engines, gears, horns, a bus sighing as it kneels at a stop.

Underneath the traffic, and this is what surprised me, there is a great deal of life. Skylarks over the rough grass beside the embankment. A group of teenagers on a footbridge, dropping pebbles onto the lorry roofs and arguing about whether that is dangerous. A man walking a very old dog, who told me that he had walked this stretch every evening for fifteen years and had never seen anyone else do it on purpose. A fox, heard but not seen, in the scrub behind a petrol station.

The underpasses

There are six pedestrian underpasses on the southern half of the ring road, and I stopped in each one for several minutes. They are the best rooms in the piece. The concrete walls take the traffic noise from above and turn it into something lower and slower, a sort of hum that you feel in your chest. Footsteps echo. In the fourth underpass somebody had left a radio playing on a ledge, tuned to a station that was playing old dance music, and I recorded it for six minutes before walking on. I do not know who left it there or why.

Why walk it

People ask what the point is. I think the ring road is the most honest part of a city. It is not built to be looked at. It has no monuments and no cafés. It is the part of the city that exists only so that people can get somewhere else, and so it has never been dressed up for anyone. Walking along it at the speed of a person, you hear the city as it sounds when nobody is performing for it.

The piece ends at the last underpass, as the lamps come on. You can hear them if you listen: a faint electric buzz, one after another, all the way along the road.