The Relocation of Ambient Sound: Urban Sound Sculpture

Bill Fontana
Abstract-The author describes his sound sculptures which explore how various instances of sound possess musical form. He explains the
sculptural qualities of sound and the aesthetic act of arranging sound into art. Detailed descriptions of three recent works illustrate how
relocating sounds from one environment to another redefines them, giving them new acoustic meanings.

1. INTRODUCTION
lasting
Sounds leaving from
different places and forming
Sounding
a sculpture which lasts [l]

I have been working in the genre of sound sculpture since 1974. My explorations of the compositional aspects of ambient sound, however, date
back to the mid-1960s. Relying primarily on the use of field recording, I have investigated a wide range of normal expenences of ambient sound
to learn and document how vanous instances of sound possess musical form-musical form in this case being the broadest possible definition of
interesting compositional relationships. The purchase, in 1972, of a tape recorder that was small enough to take with me wherever I went
enabled me to investigate many different types of ambient sound situations. After six years of serious field recording, I began to realize how full
of aesthetic possibilities these ambient sound situations were, and how unexplored or even lost such an aesthetic sensibility of them was in our
Western culture. Helmholtz provided an example of this cultural blind spot in his 1862 treatise on acoustics, On the Sensations of Tone:

The first and principal difference between various sounds experienced by our ear, is that between noises and musical sounds. The soughing,
howling, and whistling of the wind, the splashing of the water, the rolling of carriages, are examples of the first kind and the tones of all musical
instruments of the second ... [2].

My transition from working with field recording to sound sculpture occurred as a solution to an unsolved question that became increasingly
urgent as my experience with field recording grew: How can I make art out of ambient sounds?

Influenced by Duchamp's strategy of the found object, I began to realize that the relocation of an ambient sound source within a new context
would alter radically the acoustic meaning of the ambient sound source. I conceived such relocations in sculptural terms because ambient sounds
are sculptural in the way they belong to a panicular place. To make an out of an ambient sound, the act of placing this sound would have
considerable aesthetic importance.

In both my field recording and sound sculpture, sounds are not isolated from their contexts; in relocating sounds, I have been concerned with the
contexts in which the sounds are placed and with the sculptural/spatial qualities of the sound source. For me, the richness and beauty of ambient
sounds come from their interaction with a living situation. For this reason, I have installed most of my recent sound sculptures outdoors, in
juxtaposition with actual contexts of ambient sound. In addition to the sound content, the acoustic conditions and architectural qualities of such
contexts have played important roles in my selection of sculpture sites. The medium of radio has also proven an effective context in which to
present ambient sounds. When played on the radio, a given sound is juxtaposed instantaneously with thousands of different ambient sound
contexts. I have thus included live radio components in several recent sound sculptures that were site-specific, which has had the effect of
extending them in new and surprising ways.

In addition to their sculptural abi]ity to belong to a particular space, ambient sounds a re sculptural as volumes of space in terms of how a given
sound source occupies its own sound field. Through multiple-perspective field recordings and live relocations of environmental sound
processes, I have investigated this sculptural property of sound in many different circumstances. Real-time multiple-acoustic perspectives reveal
qualities in sound sources that are not explicit in our typical perception of them. Such factors as acoustic delays, the Doppler effect and phasing
reveal elegant musical structures in even the most simple of environmental sound sources. When a multiple-perspective rendering of the sounds
of one place (either live or recorded) is installed in another space and played from a number of carefully positioned loudspeakers, dynamic and
vivid relocations of the sound sources can be realized. When thinking about the transformed acoustic meaning that a familiar sound acquires
when its whole sound field is considered, I ask myself, What is this sound that I am now hearing? The answer I give is that this sound is all the
possible ways there are to hear it.

During the past few years I have had the opportunity to realize sound projects in New York, San Francisco, Hawaii, Alaska, West Berlin,
Cologne, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Thailand, Australia and Japan. Three of these projects, described below, illustrate different ways of
relocating an ambient sound source within a new environmental context.
II. OSCILLATING STEEL GRIDS ALONG THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE
The road surface of the Brooklyn Bridge is a studded steel grid. A car driving over this surface produces an oscillating tone, the exact frequency
of which is determined by the speed of the car. The pervasive droning quality of this sound makes it musical (in the language of contemporary
music). Many people in the immediate environment of the Brookyn Bridge, such as pedestrians on the bridge's walkway or passengers in a car,
respond negatively to the humming of the bridge, perhaps because the sound is so loud when heard close up.

For the centenary of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1983, I wanted to take this humming sound and put it somewhere else in New York City where it
would be out of context and a surprise to hear. I selected the large open plaza below the World Trade Center towers. Acoustically, this large
open space has a low ambient sound level, as it is far from traffic sounds and is surrounded by high buildings. The World Trade Center is also a
contemporary New York landmark, while the Brooklyn Bridge is a much older one. Additionally, I find that the towers of the World Trade
Center have a sciencefictional quality that works well with and is shared by the humming of the Brooklyn Bridge. Loudspeakers were hidden in
the facade of Tower One so that the humming sound of the bridge would become the sound of the World Trade Center towers. These humming
sounds were transmitted live from the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center by means of equalized broadcast-quality telephone lines. This
meant that the normal changes of the day, such as traffic (less traffic meant faster cars producing higher pitched tons) and weather
(thunderstorms occuring simultaneously at the bridge and the plaza created an interesting acoustical delay) could be heard, as well as the special
sounds of the Brooklyn Bridge centenary (the parade, boat whistles and fireworks).
In this architectural context, the familiar humming of the Brooklyn Bridge became an acoustic paradox. The kinesthetic sense of this humming
coming from somewhere about the plaza, from "somewhere up in the struts" as the Village Voice described it, was an important formal element
of the sound sculpture. The physical and spatial relationships of the humming sound to the architectural scale of the World Trade Center towers
altered the acoustic scale of the humming. This alteration of scale gave the humming sound of the Brooklyn Bridge a new spectrum of possible
acoustic meanings.
III. ENTFERNTE ZÜGE (DISTANT TRAINS)
In the fall of 1983, while living in West Berlin as a composer, I was invited to design a temporary site-specific work for one of several possible
locations in the city as part of a city-wide architectural exhibition scheduled for the fall of 1984.

I selected the former Anhalter Bahnhof as the site for Entfernte Züge because the ruins of this former train station were suggestive of sound to
me. The first time I visited the Anhalter Bahnhof, the empty field behind the shattered facade seemed strangely quiet, as if haunted by the
sounds of trains and people. This 'acoustical haunting' was so vivid that I decided to design a sound sculpture that would suggest the same
experience to anyone passing through the site.

I wanted to take the sound of the busiest contemporary German train station and relocate it in Berlin at the Anhalter Bahnhof. After some
research, I selected the Köln Hauptbahnhof, the busiest train station in Europe. There the sounds of the train announcements are nearly constant.
Often several simultaneous announcements create a spontaneous kind of sound poetry. The sounds of the trains themselves, the signals at both
ends of the station and the voices and footsteps of people are also ever-present.

My original design called for the live sound from the Köln Hauptbahnhof to be plaved at the Anhalter Bahnhof. As a live relocation of sound,
the times of the train announcements coming from Köln would also be actual in Berlin. However, because of its political and geographic
isolation within East Germany, West Berlin had only limited broadcast facilities, which made a live eight-channel audio transmission to the city
impossible. The alternative was to make an eight-channel tape version in which the feeling of real time was preserved.

An important design consideration in this sound sculpture was how to install loudspeakers in the large empty field behind the ruin so that they
would not be visible. Visible speakers would have greatly weakened the psychological impact of the sound scu]pture. The loudspeakers also had
to overcome the acoustic difficulties of projecting sound into a large empty place. The only possible solution was to bury the loudspeakers using
a special construction. This was an ideal solution because, in theory, optimum loudspeaker dispersion takes place when the loudspeaker
diaphragm is positioned on the same plane as the earth with the sound projecting upwards. Such a positioning of the eight loudspeakers gave the
recorded sound of the Köln Hauptbahnhof great vividness and presence in the acoustic space of the large empty field. This also made the sound
of the Köln Hauptbahnhof seem kinesthetically correct, despite the absence of an actua] train station. Kinesthetically correct sound placement
was an important formal aspect of this sound sculpture. In the realization of Entfernte Züge at the Anhalter Bahnhof, the loudspeakers were
buried in two parallel rows that mimicked the position of tracks and platforms; this placement of the sounds of the Köln Hauptbahnhof made
this work 'come to life'.
IV. METROPOLIS KÖLN
An invitation to make a live acoustic portrait of the city of Köln for a symposium to be held in September 1985 provided me with the
opportunity to combine my interests in many different types of sounds into one large project [5]. In all of my previous sound sculptures, I had
concentrated on relocating one type of sound source to a new context. In making these relocations, I had been concerned with the perceived
scale of the sound source. I had manipulated this sense of acoustic scale by juxtaposing sound with the physical/architectural elements of the
sculpture site. I had learned that this use of acoustic relocation and acoustic scale was a powerful method for altering the perceived acoustical
meaning of ordinary and familiar sounds. For Metropolis Köln I would need to relocate simultaneously many different types of sounds to a
suitable sculpture site and also to realize a live radio concert of the city's sounds.

The sculpture site of this work was Roncalliplatz, the large square plaza adjacent to the south facade of the Kölner Dom (cathedral). With its
towering Gothic spires and overwhelming presence, the Dom is the dominant architectural element of this plaza. Because it has the feeling of
being the center and heart of Köln, the plaza seemed suitable as the site for this iive acoustic portrait. A total of 18 loudspeakers were hidden on
the four sides of the plaza, each one corresponding to live sound coming from 18 microphones placed around the city. Six loudspeakers were
hidden along a balcony of the Dom located about 80 feet above the plaza. Twelve more loudspeakers were placed on the roofs of buildings
bordering the other three sides of Roncalliplatz.

Live microphones were positioned at various acoustic landmarks around Köln; these included the Hauptbahnhof, four different bridges over the
Rhine river, the clock and bell towers of six Romanesque churches, a pedestrian street, three locations in the Kölner Zoo and two locations along
the Rhine river. These river locations created the constant sound of waves and water, each one having a different timbre: one came from a
microphone that transmitted the sound of waves at the water's edge, the other came from a hydrophone in the Rhine. The live sound from the
hydrophone was broadcast to a loudspeaker on the edge of Roncalliplatz in the Old Roman Harbor Street. During the day and early evening, the
city was alive with many sounds and activities, with these river sounds providing a constant texture among many other sounds. In the evening as
the city became quieter, the sound of the river would take over, apparently becoming the sound of the Dom. In the early morning and at twilight,
the live microphones broadcasting from the Zoo became very active, as if sea lions, birds and apes were suddenly calling from the balcony of
the Dom. On the hour, the Romanesque bell towers told the time from positions all around Roncalliplatz; the time they told was not entirely
correct since they were all off slightly from each other. Ships passing under bridges, trams and trains making the bridges resonate could be heard
from the Dom and the roof of the Romanisch/Germanisches Museum. A microphone placed under a manhole cover on a pedestrian street would
broadcast the resonant and percussive sounds of footsteps and the sounds of muted voices. Microphones in the Hauptbahnhof would broadcast
train announcements, the whistles from the Wagenmeister and the loud signals at the end of a platform. The changing combinations of these
sounds heard from different positions around the large open space of Roncalliplatz created the compositional and spatial form of this sound
sulpture.

In addition to the sound sculpture installed at Roncalliplatz, a live radio version was broadcast one Saturday during the noon hour. For this
broadcast, I made a live mix that explored different combinations of the various sounds, both as they sounded at their source and as they
sounded in Roncalliplatz. During this hour, the six Romanesque churches performed a score that I had prepared, which used different densities
of bell sounds and different durations of silence to frame the other city sounds. Mobile radio listeners moving through the city with car radios or
walkmans could hear a unique and spontaneous interaction of the live broadcast with live sound sources of thc city. Unsuspecting persons who
were not near a radio or the sound sculpture could hear the sound of the urban landscape change in the synchronized ringing of these six
churches. It was my intention to turn the urban landscape of Köln temporarily into a musical sculpture.
V. FUTURE PROJECTS
My work with sound sculpture continues with several upcoming projects. In September 1986, I will realize a live acoustic portrait of Stockholm
for Swedish Radio. Installed as a sound sculpture on the facade of the Stadshuset (Town Hall), it will both sound across a wide waterway and be
broadcast as a radio concert. For the fiftieth anniversary of the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge in May 1987, I will realize Sound Sculptures
through the Golden Gate. This work will be a trilogy of adjacent sound sculptures corresponding to three adjacent acoustic zones found in the
Gulf of the Farallones at the entrance to San Francisco Bay: the sounds of thousands of birds and marine mammals on SE Farallon, the
underwater sounds of whales and dolphins between the Farallones and the entrance to San Francisco Bay, and the sounds of the Golden Gate
Bridge with its foghorns and expansion joints. Microphones and hydrophones will transmit the sounds simultaneously to the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art and the Museum Ludwig in Köln. This work also will be a live radio event broadcast simultaneously throughout the
U.S.A. and Europe [6]. In August 1988, I will create a live acoustic map of five Dutch cities. This work will be installed simultaneously in
public spaces of five different cities in Holland.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even, Richard Hamilton version, and G.H. Hamilton trans. 3rd Ed. (New York:
Jaap Rietman 1976).
2. Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensarions of Tone, Alexander Ellis, trans. (New York: Dover Edition, 1954) p. 7.
3. Guy Trebay, "The Music of Sound", The Village Voice, (26 July 1983) p. 59.
4. This temporary site-specific work was commissioned by West Berlin's redevelopment agency (International Building Exhibitions). At the
time, I was a guest composer of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD (Berlin Artists Program of the German Academic Exchange
Service).
5. The invitation was proffered by the Hörspiele (sound play or drama) department of West German Radio (WDR) in Köln. The symposium was
called Acustica International.
6. In the U.S.A., it will be broadcast by American Public Radio: in Europe, by WDR Köln as a feature event of the European Broadcast Union
Convention in Köln.
Sound as Virtual Image by Bill Fontana
We look around and almost everything we see, except for light reflections and shadows, corresponds exactly to the place being looked at.
Listening does not have the same sense of spatial correspondences as visual perception. With visual perception, we look directly at what is being
seen, in listening we orient ourselves to where the sound is, not necessarily to where it is coming from. In visual perception, there is usually
simultaneity between the viewer and the object of perception. With sound there is often a time lag, since we can often hear a sound source
before or after we see it. In aural perception, we sometimes do not see what we are actually hearing. Because sound is experienced in a 360
degree way, we hear overlapping residues of many sounds at any given moment. If we were trained to turn mentally towards everything we
hear, we would achieve a sense of spatial correspondence comparable to visual perception. Since as a culture we are not trained to bring this
mental orientation to sound, the time lag between what we see and what we hear and the resulting disparities between our senses of visual and
aural spatial correspondences have contributed greatly to our present cultural blind(deaf) spot - the concept of noise.
This sense of spatial correspondences is indicative of how as a culture we turn perception into meaning. Looking makes the object of vision
discrete and identifiable, possessed with the logical possibility of being considered by itself. This becomes expressed as a name. The names we
have are developed out of functional visual experiences; semantic systems make those experiences clear and distinct.

"..if the general description of the world is like a stencil of the world, the names pin it to the world so that the world is wholly covered by it"
(Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations)

Language has been the line of demarcation. It determines where we employ our mental focus. It has been the mind space where things become
clear.

"A picture held us captive, and we could not get outside it for it lay in our language and the language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably"
(Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations)

As a visually oriented culture our essential responses to the everyday world are semantic. Everyday sounds are regarded as not having semantic
significance (noise). Noise pollution (with the exception of sounds that are dangerously loud (close proximity to a jet aircraft or heavy
machinery) can be explained as a semantic problem. Because sounds must be semanticized in order to be meaningful, our main aural concerns
as a culture have been language and music.

"colors are present "naturally" in nature, there are no musical sounds in nature, except in a purely accidental and unstable way; there are only
noises. Sounds and colors are not entities of the same standing, and the only legitimate comparison is between colors and noises - that is
between visual and acoustic modes of nature...nature produces noises not musical sounds: the latter are solely a consequence of culture, which
has invented musical instruments and singing. But apart from the instance of bird song....man would be unacquainted with musical sounds if he
had not invented them. " (Claude Levi-Strauss from "The Raw and the Cooked")
The world of everyday sound is full of semantic ambiguity. Most people approach this experience without recognizing patterns in everyday
sound. Noise is the resulting interpretation given to the normal experience of unsemanticized sounds. The semantic ambiguity of sound will
change when society develops a capacity to perceive patterns or qualities that are recognizable as part of a context of meaning, such as the sound
vocabularies of contemporary music and acoustic art.

The problem of noise has developed historically from an accumulation of bad designs caused by a lack of thinking about the acoustical by
products of everything that happens in the human environment. Noise pollution is a circular problem: people don't pay attention to the sounds
they hear and live with everyday and therefore it is not a part of the design of anything to consider the acoustical consequences. This problem is
a self-perpetuating cultural blind(deaf) spot on the collective consciousness.
The task of acoustic art and acoustic design is to fundamentally challenge all of the old historical definitions of noise and the resulting
preconceptions that most people have about the sounds they live with.

My work over the past 25 years has been an ongoing investigation into the aesthetic significance of sounds happening at a particular moment in
time. This has led me to create a series of projects that treat the urban and natural environment as a living source of musical information. The
most basic assumption I am making is that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear. I am in fact assuming that music -
in the sense of meaningful sound patterns - is a natural process that is going on constantly.

Most of my projects have been created in urban public space, where an architectural situation is used as the physical and visual focal point of
sounds that are relocated to these situations. Loudspeakers are normally mounted on the exterior of a building or a monument and are used to
deconstruct and transform the situation by creating a virtual transparent reality of sound.

My most recent project in Paris, "Sound Island" was installed at the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe is an island at the center of an
immense traffic circle. It is an urban architectural island not because it is surrounded by water, but by a sea of cars. The constant flow of
hundreds of encircling cars are the dominant visual and aural experience one has when standing under the towering monument, looking out at
Paris. This sound sculpture explored the transformation of the visual and aural experience of traffic. Live natural white sounds of the sea from
the Normandy coast were transmitted to loudspeakers installed on the facade of the monument. The presence of the breaking and crashing waves
created the illusion that the cars were silent. This was accomplished in contradiction to the visual aspects of the situation. The sound of the sea is
natural white sound, and has the psycho-acoustic ability to mask other sounds, not by virtue of being louder, but because of the sheer harmonic
complexity of the sea sound.

The placement of a work of acoustic art inside the space of an art museum raises some interesting issues. Museums are institutions devoted to
the visual, retinal experience. The idea of placing a sound sculpture inside of a museum space, which cannot be seen with the eyes is an apparent
contradiction, which is why so few museums have ever been interested in the type of work I am doing. Sound sculptures placed on the exterior
of a building take on the visual aspects of the architecture and the urban landscape in which they are placed and create a perceptual tension
between what you see and what you hear. Sound sculptures placed inside of a Museum, with no apparent visual element, create a new tension.
They are made from sounds that come from places that we know, imagine and recognize as visual situations. If someone goes beyond the
strangeness of hearing the naked sounds and takes the time to listen, the actual visual aspects of the sound sculpture lies in this person's
imagination, in their personal mental space to create virtual images.
THE ENVIRONMENT AS A MUSICAL RESOURCE
by Bill Fontana
"music goes on all the time around us and is made audible by a musician" (Henry Cowell)

Part 1 -Vienna 1990

The concept of ecology is used to describe the harmonious relationships existing between living species in natural habitats that enables them to
mutually survive together. In these natural habitats, ecology can also be understood as being successful design1 relationships between the
various aspects of environment.

In the human/ built environments (which are supposed to be designed because they are constructed), the qualitative aspects of these
environments are also crucial to the well being of society. 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 designed2, and it is
only very recently that the concept of sound design and soundscape have even existed.

In natural environments, sound design can be perceived as the pleasing sound relationships we hear (and expect to hear) between for example,
song birds in a forest. What we perceive as being aesthetically pleasing sound relationships have deeper ecological functions, such as the ability
of many bird songs to travel long distances and to be clearly recognizable. This can happen even during the acoustically active early morning
time without these songs overwhelming each other. This ability of certain bird songs to travel long distances and to be clearly recognizable is
not caused by the songs being loud relative to other competing songs, but because the melodic shape and exact frequencies of these songs are
tuned to the acoustics of the particular habitats they are in. It is also interesting that in the melodic shapes of these songs, they are not constantly
at a peak loudness but are only momentarily at these peaks, making it possible for melodic lines from different birds to overlay each other and
retain their individual clarity. Thus, the central design aspect is the ability of all of this sound information to be heard together and achieve its
communications purposes.

In the human/built environment there are some interesting examples of designed sounds that can be beautiful to hear. For example, fog horns,
train whistles, and bells are designed to travel long distances and be clearly recognizable. However, in a general sense the human soundscape is
not designed. Many densities of sounds occur at sustained high levels that have no quiet space in their acoustic shape. This traditional lack of
designed sounds and sound relationships is largely influenced by the concept of noise. This concept assumes a hierarchical value difference
between meaningful and meaningless sounds. 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 language of contemporary music is full of sounds, (from John Cage and other serious composers to the
sampled sounds of popular music). The presence of ambient sounds in the music context has certainly influenced perceptions of ambient sound
among people who are exposed to the music. One limitation however, is that 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. Such a transformation of "noise" in a more permanent way will
make the human/built environment become more livable, because it will stimulate society to develop a sensibility for its ambient sounds,
causing more of the general public soundscape to become designed.

My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a musical information system full of interesting sound events. In designing
such real time musical information systems I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear. I am in fact
assuming that music, in the sense of meaningful sound patterns, is a natural process that is going on constantly. These information systems are
designed by selecting interesting sound locations within either an urban or natural environment, placing live microphones or hydrophones at
these locations, and simultaneously transmitting the sounds to a central listening point (sound sculpture location).

It may be self-evident that such environmental music can be found in natural environments, but someone may be skeptical that it can really be
found in the urban environment. My sound sculptures have often used live urban based sound sources to construct such musical information
systems. METROPOLIS COLOGNE (1985) had live microphones installed at 18 locations throughout the center of Cologne simultaneously
transmitting to loudspeakers mounted on the facade of the Cologne Cathedral. LJUDSKULPTUR i STOCKHOLM (1986) used the city of
Stockholm as a sound source and used these sounds to explore the acoustic space of the 600 meter wide fjord in front of the Town Hall. Sounds
were sent to both sides of this waterway, and produced many interesting echoes. ENTFERNTE ZUGE (1984) brought the sounds of the Cologne
main train station to the ruin of the former Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin. In 1984, when this was realized, the ruin consisted of a large empty field
(where the main station hall was once located) and the remains of the station entrance at the head of the empty field. This sound sculpture not
only explored the aesthetic aspects of a multiple perspective sound rendering (8 channel) of the Cologne station but it also explored the power of
this relocated sound to evoke a sense of historical resonance and place in Berlin. To enhance the evocative qualities of the sound, loudspeakers
were buried in the large empty field so as not to visually interrupt the stark qualities of the Anhalter Bahnhof. SOUND SCULPTURES
THROUGH THE GOLDEN GATE (1987) was a live duet between the Farallon Islands National Wildlife Refuge and the Golden Gate Bridge,
thus combining natural and urban based sound sources. This island is the westerly limit of San Francisco, lying 32 nautical miles directly west
of the Golden Gate Bridge. The small island is an important wildlife refuge for migrating sea birds and marine mammals, and in the spring
(when this sound sculpture was realized), had a population of more than 500,000 birds and three thousand marine mammals. The Golden Gate
Bridge as well as being a visual landmark of San Francisco is also an acoustic landmark because its fog horns (which are often sounding) can be
heard through large areas of the city and harbor. The bridge also produces a constant percussive sound from cars driving over various joints.
This island and bridge duet was heard in the middle of downtown San Francisco during the 50th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge from
loudspeakers mounted on the facade of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was also the San Francisco component of the SATELLITE
SOUNDBRIDGE COLOGNE-SAN FRANCISCO (1987), which was a live duet via satellite of environmental sounds from San Francisco and
Cologne. This was heard on radio stations throughout Europe and the U.S. and as a sound sculpture at the Museum Ludwig. In June of this year
I am realizing ACOUSTICAL VIEWS OF KYOTO (1990) which combines urban, natural and religious sounds of Kyoto with a hill top
sculpture site (Kyoto City College of Arts) that commands panoramic views of the urban and natural landscape of Kyoto. At the sculpture site
you have distant panoramic views, and where you can see much further than you can hear. This sound sculpture explores the experience of
hearing as far as you can see, by borrowing the landscape for sound3 by simultaneously bringing many live sounds from the Kyoto landscape to
the hilltop.
My purpose in installing LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS (with its live sounds from the Au) in the public space of the Maria Theresien Platz is not
intended to be a romantic return to nature. It is intended to be a radical transformation of the acoustic meaning of this public space. The acoustic
qualities of the Maria Theresien Platz also transforms the natural sounds from the Au because of the sonically reflective presence of the two
parallel museum buildings.

The musical information system constructed in the Au for LANDSCAPE SOUNDINGS simultaneously listens from 16 microphone locations
and transmits4 these sounds to Vienna at the Maria Theresien Platz. These microphone locations are sub-divided into large spatial groupings of
microphones. These groupings are located in the Au near Witzelsdorf, Stopfenreuth and Hainburg. Each spatial grouping distributes individual
microphones at intervals of least 100 meters apart from each other. The most extreme distances of the first to the last microphone are more than
one kilometer. When you divide these relative microphone distances by the speed of sound (330 meters per second) a potential time structure is
created that describes the movement of sounds though the Au landscape that is mapped by the microphone positions. The longest acoustic
delays occur in relation to sounds that are loud enough to travel through the Au landscape to the most widely separated microphones.
Nightingales, woodpeckers, crows, amsels, drossels, ducks, cuckoo, eichelhaher, meisen, finken, rotschwanzchen and reiher are loud enough to
echo through these furthest microphones. Sometimes these microphone installations hear echoes created by the nearby human presence.
Although the microphones are as far away as possible from the sounds of aircraft, traffic and trains, they occasionally enter the microphone
configuration. Thus, the distant airplanes may become like a flying organ, as each microphone hears its Doppler shifting engine harmonics with
different pitches. Train and boat whistles as well as church bells can sometimes be heard reverberating through the landscape.

"The clear voice

of the fulling-block echoes up
 to the Northern stars"
(Basho)
Part 2 -Lyon 2000
Part 1 of this essay was published 10 years ago in Vienna on the occasion of a large-scale installation called "Landscape Soundings". I have
chosen to publish Part 2 under the same title, as this basic concept of using the environment as live source of musical information has continued
to be a fundamental aesthetic principle in my work.

In 1990 I wrote the following:

My sound sculptures use the human and/or natural environment as a musical information system full of interesting sound events. In designing
such real time musical information systems I am assuming that at any given moment there will be something meaningful to hear. I am in fact
assuming that music, in the sense of meaningful sound patterns, is a natural process that is going on constantly.

This idea, succinctly stated here, has been the aesthetic basis of my work for the past 25 years. This idea is no less relevant for me today than it
was with my first live projects.

In the beginning stages of my work, this idea was more of an assumption than a fact.

After realizing many different projects around the world that all involved the creation of a musical information network, I conclude that there is
something compelling about the hearing the simultaneity of sounds in a natural landscape, a city, a structure such as a bridge, a train station, a
harbor or a long stretch of beach. What is so compelling is the natural completeness of the live flows of musical events and patterns. That the
live ambient sound constellations present such seemingly perfect relationships makes this art form actualize an awareness of what is already
present.
In the accumulation of making projects and directly experiencing the simultaneity of sound in the environment (landscapes or cityscapes),
investigating the aesthetic horizons of the present moment are the most exciting and challenging genre to explore.

The working process is a kind of composition in reverse. The music and the patterns exist as some incredible unheard music, because in order
for them to hear it would be necessary to be with ones body in all these locations at the same time. Thinking about the
musicality of the world as the simultaneity of sound events becomes a redefinition of the sense of embodiment. Listening in acoustic space is
always an activity of a body in a space. The installation of microphones and sensors in many places at the same time takes streams of
disembodied information and reconstructs them into a new form of embodiment.

The sculptural placement of the live multiple audio streams in one space as a sound sculpture has been an important strategy for reconfiguring
the acoustic sense of the body in relation to an environment. In my recent ACOUSTICAL VISIONS OF VENICE, which was installed during
the last Venice Biennale on the façade of the Punta della Dogana, live sounds from 13 locations in the visual panorama, acoustically wrapped
this building with its amazing views. It created a situation that you could hear as far as you could see. This new multidimensional acoustic body
of Venice was transparent and framed the actual acoustic events one would normally hear at the Dogana, so that whenever a bell rang or ship
blew its horn, one heard it first at the speed of light and then at the speed of sound. A physicist visiting the sculpture remarked to me that I had
created a reverberant zone. This newly created acoustic body of Venice could effect ones memory and anticipation of sound relationships when
one reentered the normal acoustic life of this city in ones pedestrian journeys. Perhaps to a sensitive observer, the sounds of Venice would seem
more alive and full of musical potential. If they returned to the sound sculpture at different times, perhaps the interaction with their personal
acoustic memories would intensify.

While ACOUSTICAL VISIONS OF VENICE was running, I made extensive digital multi-track recordings. Listening to these in a studio,
removed from the interactive context of a live installation, I am struck by the complexity and richness of sounds that this live information flow
created. In studying these recordings, I realized that it would not have been possible to achieve this level of complexity or musical cohesiveness
without the use of a live musical information network. An installation version will be created in the Acoustic Art studio of WDR Cologne will
be presented as a large gallery installation at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Cologne this May, as part of the Cologne Musik Triannele.

It occurred to me in the Venice project that if it had remained as a permanent installation, it would have an interesting accumulative impact on
the public awareness of sound. . The project I am currently creating for new Lyon Tramway system gives me the opportunity to do that by
integrating a musical information network with the public transportation network of the Tram.

This sound sculpture will create a musical information network out of sounds from the city of Lyon and continuously transport changing
combinations of them to all the stations along the Line 1 of the new Lyon Tramway System.

The invisible presence of this sound sculpture will make it a work whose essential form is perceptual, mental and corporeal. This sound
sculpture will be an ongoing investigation into the relationships existing between an individual's acoustic memory of the city and the live sound
collages (of those elements) that will be a constantly changing overlay to waiting for or departing from a tram. The placement of this sound
sculpture as an integral recurring event at each station will have an accumulative effect over time, so that during the daily experience of riding
the tram one will hear and recognize more and more acoustic patterns in the city. This accumulative pattern recognition will not only enliven
ones relationship to the Tram journeys, but to ones pedestrian journeys through the city.

The fact that this sculpture is invisible conveys urban ecology that will not clutter the already visually saturated cityscapes. This invisibility will
also be in harmony with the visual experience of the city that the transparent architecture of the Tram Stations expresses.
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.

Sound will be used as a medium to express the simultaneity of urban life in a way that is not possible with visual media, since it will be possible
to hear multiple sound events from different parts of city at the same time. At any given moment, someone waiting for a tram will be transported
to other parts of Lyon in an acoustic journey of the imagination and of memory.

A rich vocabulary of Lyon sound locations will be fed live into the musical information network from all of the familiar areas of the city
creating a language that is concrete, evocative, abstract and transparent. Most of the sounds in this network will be live, although this network
will accumulate acoustic memories over time that will be stored on a hard disk recording system. These recorded elements will sometimes float
through the continuous streams of live elements, which in the sculptural time of permanence will give an evolving historical dimension to this
work.

The accumulative impact on the public perception of noise in Lyon will change over time. The idea of an artwork that integrates listening to
Lyon within the total infrastructure of a tram line will curiously bring a new kind of silence to Lyon, even though sound is being placed in
public situations. This will be accomplished because the more literate the public becomes to the acoustic patterns of the city, the more musical
these sounds will seem to be. The more musical the acoustic ambience of a city becomes the less perceivable noise there will be as the public
develops an evolving and accumulative sense of ambient acoustic literacy.
RESOUNDINGS by 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? For these sound recordings to be as
aesthetically meaningful as musical compositions required some radical solutions, but I did not as yet know what these were to be.

My search for these aesthetic solutions continued as I went to live in Australia in the early 1970's. I had an amazing job working for the
Australian Broadcasting corporation to record what Australia sounded like from 1974 to 1978. This gave me the chance to listen, dream and
record with unlimited technical resources for the first time in my life.

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), and the other was an 8 channel field recording of wave patterns happening beneath a floating concrete pier.

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.

At this moment, I became interested in Duchamp, and a passage from "the bride stripped bare by her bachelors even", which led me to call my
art form sound sculpture:

Musical Sculpture
lasting and
Sounds leaving from

different places and

forming
sounding
a sculpture which lasts.
 My 1976 recording of Kirribilli Wharf (on Sydney harbor) was the first time I attempted to apply sculptural thinking to the recordable listening
process by making an 8 channel field recording.

Kirribilli Wharf was a floating concrete pier that was in a perpetual state of automatic self performance. There were rows of small cylindrical
holes going between the floor and underside to the sea below. They sounded with the percussive tones of compression waves as the holes were
momentarily closed by the waves. This 8 channel recording consisted of placing microphones over the openings of eight such holes, making a
real time sound map of the wave action in the sea below the pier. It was later installed as a gallery installation played from 8 loudspeakers in a
space.

This recording was seminal for my work because it was first time that a conceptual analysis of a natural musical process resulted in a live
recording that was as genuinely musical as music; and because of the spatial complexity of 8 channels answering each other from 8 points in
space, it also became genuinely sculptural .

It was also sculptural in another important way, the percussive wave action at Kirribilli Wharf had continuousness and permanence about it.
This 8 channel tape was not a recording of a unique moment, as with the total eclipse, but was an excerpt from a sound process that is perpetual.
Twelve years after this recording was made, I returned to Kiribilli Wharf and placed microphones there which transmitted live sound to the Art
Gallery of New south sales in sydney, as part of a sound sculpture.
2
The most elemental characteristic of any sound is duration.

Sounds that repeat, that are continuous and that have long duration defy the natural acoustic mortality of becoming silent..

In the ongoing sculptural definition of my work I have used different strategies to overcome the ephemeral qualities of sound, that seem to be in
marked contrast to the sense of physical certainty and permanence that normally belong to sculpture and architecture.

One of the most useful methods has been to create installations that connect two separate physical environments through the medium of
permanent listening. Microphones installed in one location transmit their resulting sound continuums to another location, where they can be
permanently heard as a transparent overlay to visual space.
As these acoustic overlays create the illusion of permanence, they start to interact with the temporal aspects of the visual space. This will
suspend the known identity of the site by animating it with evocations of past identities playing on the acoustic memory of the site, or by
deconstructing the visual identity of the site by infusing it with a totally new acoustic identity that is strong enough to compete with its visual
identity.
3
"Pigeon Soundings" and "Perpetual Motion" are two sound sculptures which will be permanently installed in the new Diözesanmuseum to be
built on the site of St. Kolumba.

Since the end of World War II, the church of St. kolumba has been a ruin, inhabited by thousands of pigeons. "Pigeon Soundings" is an 8
channel sound map of the acoustic life and movements of these pigeons in St. Kolumba; where they nest along the top of the west wall, and fly
back and forth across a large rectangular open gap, to the top of a parallel roof surface, that diagonally slants downward across the remainder of
the ruin.

This sound map is an 8 channel real time recording of the movements and voices of pigeons in the ruin. Eight microphones were mounted in two
parallel groups of four that were placed along the two sides of the rectangular space. The resulting recordings mapped out the movements and
overlapping sound fields of the pigeons behavior and flights within the space.

In the future, when the new museum is built, it will no longer be a nesting site for pigeons. These 8 channel recordings will be played from a
sculptural installation of 8 loudspeakers that are placed in the same spatial positions as the microphones, becoming an acoustic evocation of this
50 year period in between being a functioning church and a museum for the next century.

This ruin being taken over by pigeons may at first give the impression of decay and death. It is certainly nature's way of reclaiming what had
gone out human control. In this 50 year span of pigeons sounding in the ruin, many timeless generations of pigeons came and went. In this
passage of nameless birds, the space was returned to a pure state of timelessness, where all of its soundings were supposed to be unheard. These
pigeon soundings became the space dreaming to itself, returning to a primal state that lay in the realm of new beginnings.

This almost magical sense of a space returning to its essence through by sounding to itself in an acoustical dream, is much more than a poetic
illusion in the yet to be realized permanent sound sculpture called "Perpetual Motion",

This sound sculpture will use the four old bells in the collection of the Diozezesanmuseum Köln as living ears to the present and future
acoustical life of the city of Cologne. In a permanent sculptural installation, they would be mounted on the roof of the future Kolumba Museum.
Sensitive microphones and accelerometers would be placed inside of each bell to hear the resonant frequencies of the bells as they are excited by
the ambient sounds of Köln. At a site to be determined in the future Kolumba Museum, a sculptural installation of loudspeakers would
continuously play the live sounds of the bell resonances.

Two types of vibrational phenomena will take place in these bells. Resonant frequencies within the air cavities of each bell will be exicited by
ambient sound. This air cavity will also act as a filter, redefining the harmonic shape of the urban ambiance according to the physical structure
of each bell. The metal structure of the bells will also produce minute vibrations that can be heard by accelerometers that are attached to the
metal surfaces of the bell. These vibrations within the bell metal are very musical, and are metallic echoes and pitch transformations of the
original sounds. The simultaneous hearing of the air cavity with an acoustic mirophone, and the metal vibrations with the accelerometer will
reveal a magical acoustical world within the timeless silence of these old bells.
4
The environmental sounds that are the most impressive to record, posses a natural timelessness. The breaking waves of the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans, Niagara Falls, the Rhine Falls, are all sounds that have happened continuously for millions of years. When I record them, I am struck by
this fact. Making a recording that is even the length of a 2 hour DAT tape is a trivial excerpt from a sound with no apparent beginning or end, as
close as we can come to experiencing infinity in the acoustic realm.

"Sound Island" (Paris, 1994) and "Vertical Rhine Soundings" (proposed for the 750 anniversary of the Kölner DOM) are two concepts for sound
sculptures which treat a famous architecutural structure as an icon to be transformed by an acoustic overlay . This use of sound creates a poetic
deconstruction of the known identity of the site, creating an illusion that the architectural icon is dreaming out loud, making public what could
only be imagined as sounding to ifself.

Both of these projects use the sounds of perpetual moving water to achieve this acoustic overlay, the sound of the sea in Normandy and the
Rhine Falls.

"Sound Island" was installed at the Arc de Triomphe, in which the live sound of the sea from Normandy was broadcast to 48 loudspeakers
hidden on the facade of the monument, creating the illusion that the cars circling the place de l'Etoile were silent. The Arc de Triomphe is an
island at the center of an immense traffic circle. It is an urban architectural island not because it is surrounded by water, but by a sea of cars. The
constant flow of hundreds of encircling cars are the dominant visual and aural experience one has when standing under the towering monument,
looking out at Paris. This sound sculpture explored the transformation of the visual and aural experience of traffic. Live natural white sounds of
the sea from the Normandy coast were transmitted to loudspeakers installed on the facade of the monument. The presence of the breaking and
crashing waves created the illusion that the cars were silent. This was accomplished in contradiction to the visual aspects of the situation. The
sound of the sea is natural white sound, and has the psycho-acoustic ability to mask other sounds, not by virtue of being louder, but because of
the sheer harmonic complexity of the sea sound.

"Vertical Rhine Soundings" is as yet an unrealized dream. It is proposed for the 750th anniversary of the Cologne Cathedral and would involve
placing a sound system on many different levels of the Cathedral , so that this great architectural structure becomes an acousitic icon . This will
not transform the architecture as much as it will use the architecutre to transform the urban landscape of Cologne, temporarily turning it into a
soundscape of sounding water floating over the city as audible dream.

The sonic heart of this project will be the complex musicality created by the simultaneous wave patterns that spontaneously occur along the
entire length of the Rhine from Switzerland to the North Sea. This 1320 km long journey of the river is a continuous descent from the high
elevations of the Alps to sea level in Rotterdam. The Rhine has many different rates of flow and topographical features that make it one of the
most varied rivers in the world.

This sound sculpture will use a complex underwater listening system to hear the wave patterns in many different situations and simultaneously
transmit these sounds (from 24 to 48 locations) to a large sculptural installation of loudspeakers hidden on the entire facade of the Cologne
Cathedral. These sensuous underwater soundings will engulf, descend and flow over the great vertical structure.