Fontana’s MicroSoundings also had an interactive component: during the ambient sound part of the piece, visitors could bang, rub, scratch, or otherwise vibrate the poles of the structure and hear the resulting sound amplified through the light-pole speakers (fig. 14). This aspect of the work was not fully apparent until it was installed. Unfortunately, the all-weather didactic sign we had prepared for it had to be ordered well in advance, so the text did not invite the audience to touch the piece. While this interactivity was a key part of the tours and school groups that visited MicroSoundings, it was missing from the experience of those who encountered the work independently.

Both Spikes and MicroSoundings were widely noticed and engaged with by exhibition visitors as well as passersby. Their locations, at the entrances of buildings, allowed for a large number of people to hear them en route to other destinations. However, it was their strong visual components—Maes’s beautiful array of circuit boards and Fontana’s adoption of an existing architectural feature—that particularly captured attention and invited sustained engagement. People were also able to hear them in a more superficial way, without stopping to focus, as they moved about their day. That quality is shared with Kirkegaard’s Transmission, but not with Lucier’s Five Graves to Cairo. The entryway locations of Spikes and MicroSoundings also made them uncontroversial. They did not disrupt offices, classrooms, or study spaces. (Fontana’s work was faintly audible from the inside the building in the stairway and became familiar to folks who used that space multiple times a day, but no one complained about it while going up and down the stairs.) One Dartmouth student recalled,

I personally immediately connected with the installations at the LSC [Life Sciences Center] and in Thayer because of how well they fit into the spaces. I had class in the LSC about twice a day and passing by the installation was always an interesting experience. It reflected the sounds inside the space well and actually made it sound like it was projecting the sounds from the labs. I went with a few students inside the space as well and everyone had a lot of fun interacting with the installation and the accelerometers. In terms of the Thayer installation, I thought the clicking and the circuitry also reflected the nature of the building well.¹¹