Bill Fontana

(above: Portrait of "Jon")

I had learned about Bill Fontana when I was beginning to play with sound in my art explorations. Fontana is a sound artist who works out of San Francisco. His thoughts on sound art published on his website had a great influence on how I now see sound in the realm of post-modern art. So I think I will reposit some of his ideas here as a record of the thoughts that have move me forward on the aural side of my art:

**********Bill Fontana quotes***********

My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a living source of musical information. I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear and that music, in the sense of coherent sound patterns, is a process that is going on constantly. My methodology has been to create networks of simultaneous listening points that relay real time acoustic data to a common listening zone (sculpture site). Since 1976 I have called these works sound sculptures.

…The visual aspects of these environments (architecture, interior design, landscape design, urban design etc.) have long histories of being designed. The acoustic aspects of environment are in most cases not designed, and it is only very recently that the concept of sound design and soundscape have even existed.

… It is a general fact that most people in our Western culture find little meaning in their everyday experience of ambient sound. Sounds are normally considered meaningful when they are part of a semantic context such as speech and music. Most ambient sounds exist in a semantic void, where they are perceived as being noises. In addition to the semantic context in which meaningful sounds are experienced (music and speech), the physical context in which this semantic context is experienced is a crucial perceptual issue in the potential meaning of ambient sound… the physical contexts in which music is experienced are nearly always isolated from the physical contexts in which ambient sounds take place (concert halls, home stereos, walkmans etc).

… In my sound sculptures of the past 10 years, the relocation of ambient sounds to urban public spaces is a radical attempt to redefine the meaning of the acoustical context in which the sound sculpture is experienced. By comparison to musical situations, the use of these public spaces exposes the sound sculpture to many people who would normally never think about such aesthetic issues. This experimental redefinition of acoustical context is also a way to temporarily transform the concept of noise.

… If you think of the difference between looking at a movie with the sound track running or with the sound turned off you can best understand what the presence of this sound sculpture will be. Most people in modern cities tune out the sounds around them as noise, making the visual experience of the city like the movie without a sound track. Over time, individuals will gradually turn up the sound in their own acoustic perceptions of the city, so that the presence of this sound sculpture will be a sound bridge to an enhanced experience of city life.

**********more Bill Fontana***********

I began my artistic career as a composer. What really began to interest me was not so much the music that I could write, but the states of mind I would experience when I felt musical enough to compose. In those moments, when I became musical, all the sounds around me also became musical.

This kind of subjective musical transformation of wherever I happened to be was fascinating. The investigation and isolation of these experiences became my obsession. I began to carry a tape recorder wherever I went (the most interesting tape recorder at this time as a miniature Nagra), so that when the ambient sounds became musical, I could make a recording of them.

As these recordings accumulated, I began to wonder what it meant. Should I make concerts out of these recordings? Should I use these recordings as raw material with which to create studio compositions out of sound?

I began to regard recording a sound as an act in mental intensity equal to writing music, with some of these recordings having the real possibility of being accepted by me as a composition. But who would believe this?, composing by listening?

… Two recording experiences of this period had a seminal influence on my work. One was a recording I made in a tropical rain forest during a total eclipse of the sun (in 1976).

The total eclipse recording documented a unique moment that was a once in a lifetime experience in this environment (the next occurrence at this location will be 25 November, 2030 - a span of 54 years) . During the minutes just before the moment of totality (having a duration of 2 minutes), the acoustic protocol between birds, determining who sang at the different times of day became mixed up. All available species were singing at the same time during the minutes immediately proceeding totality, as the normal temporal clues given by light were obliterated by a rainforest suddenly filled with sparkling shadows. When totality suddenly brought total darkness, there was a deep silence.

This recording was seminal for my work because a total eclipse is always conceived of as being a visual experience, and such a compelling sonic result was indicative of how ignored the acoustic sensibility is in our normal experience of the world. From this moment on, my artistic mission consciously became the transformation and deconstruction of the visual with the aural.

This led me to not only become interested in the musicality and compositional wholeness of environmental sound, so that the act of listening and its extension through sound recording equaled music; but that the visual space that was sounding equaled sculpture and architecture.

**********end Bill Fontana***********