Interview with Bill Fontana [excerpt] by Peter Traub Networked_Music_Review http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review
Bill Fontana has been creating musical networks and making "sound sculptures" since the early 1970s. His works are usually large in scale and often involve the transmission of sounds from one 'listening' location with a network of microphones and/or sensors to another location where the sounds are overlayed onto the local sonic environment. Fontana's work focuses strongly on the idea of listening as a compositional act - that is, it is driven by the idea that music surrounds us constantly and that the patterns of music are audible if we just take the time to listen... Peter Traub: Natural sound is central to many of your pieces, especially the use of natural sound transplanted or displaced (or "trans-placed" as Anthony Moore termed it) into urban or man-made settings, such as your 1987 piece, "Sound Sculptures through the Golden Gate". The displacement and recontextualization of these sounds within new spaces is part of what makes your work effective. In the process of displacing the natural sounds, how do you treat them? That is, do you do any sort of processing on the sounds to transform them, do you prefer that they speak for themselves? Bill Fontana: There is no processing applied to the sounds except the artistic choice of putting a microphone near it or to map it. All my editing takes place before the recording or transmission is made. The transformation occurs in the re-contextualization of the sound. "Sound Sculptures through the Golden Gate", with its combination of vivid sea bird sounds and the deep musical tones of the Golden Gate Bridge Fog Horns has a musical quality that is almost Wagnerian. Many compositional details, such as how the placement of 8 microphones on different parts and dimensions of the Bridge would reveal natural acoustic delays was a type of acoustic processing that was deliberately chosen.. Bill Fontana will be answering reader's questions in the comments section until December 6, 2007. Read the complete interview here: http://tinyurl.com/2m3du3 Jo-Anne Green, Co-Director New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc.: http://new-radio.org New York: 917.548.7780 . Boston: 617.522.3856 Turbulence: http://turbulence.org Networked_Performance Blog: http://turbulence.org/blog Networked_Music_Review: http://turbulence.org/networked_music_review Upgrade! Boston: http://turbulence.org/upgrade New American Radio: http://somewhere.org _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
