Bill Fontana: MicroSoundings

Akin to Jacob Kirkegaard, Bill Fontana approaches sound from the mindset of a photographer—or, more aptly, a videographer—where the captured sonic materials are of primary importance. Fontana’s work similarly draws on field recordings made with great attention to the method and equipment used to capture sound and vibration within different environments and structures. In the vein of French electronic musician Pierre Schaeffer, Fontana treats sounds as individual “sound objects” or as Schaeffer describes it, l’objet sonore.¹⁵ Schaeffer posited that when sounds are isolated or fragmented they become sound objects, and often take on properties and associations that are markedly different from their sources.

For MicroSoundings (2017), Fontana chose to examine sounds created by machinery within the Life Sciences Building at Dartmouth College. These sounds, often quiet or even inaudible, were then transformed and amplified through loudspeakers attached to a slatted metal structure on the exterior of the building (fig. 8).¹⁶ In this way, the building itself became a speaker, projecting the inner world of laboratories and HVAC systems to the outside world. Fontana installed an additional set of speakers in front of the structure that amplified the response of the metal structure itself using accelerometers, thereby creating feedback between the virtual world of the pre-recorded material and that of the immediate present. It also recontextualized the metal structure as a musical instrument, or a readymade kinetic architecture.

The interaction between MicroSoundings and the ambient environment often overlapped, since the sounds of traffic, building air ventilation systems, and other noises easily combined with the pre-recorded sounds. Perhaps most remarkable was during light rain, when the patter of raindrops hitting the structure sounded like amplified, ringing vibraphone bars being randomly struck by an invisible performer. These sounds then seamlessly transitioned into the gurgling sounds of centrifuges, water tanks, and drones of air systems.