Bill Fontana is a composer who finds his musical material all over the world. Just as a photographer uses his camera to draw visual portraits of a city, Fontana creates acoustic portraits with sound recording devices that he carries with him at all times. The CD of two Australian Sound Sculptures published in 1990 is a typical example of Fontana’s method of recording the sound of visual discoveries. As he himself describes, one day, while waiting for a ferry at Kirribilli Wharf, he discovered a row of large holes on the station’s plateau through which the water could be seen. But the water could also be heard. Waves, swell, light surf. In collaboration with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he installed eight microphones in the eight holes. The eight-channel material recorded in this way was then edited in the studio.
His Acoustical Views are based on the experience that the human eye reaches further than the ear. Very distant things can only be perceived with the eyes. For the 1988 Sydney Biennale, Fontana installed loudspeakers along the façade of the Art Gallery of NSW. The fascinating view of the distant city skyline through a park from this building found its counterpart in the live transmission of the sounds of the city through several microphones installed there.
“Kirribilli Wharf itself is a floating dock on the north side of Sydney Harbour. I used to catch a ferry there every day to get to Circular Quay in downtown Sydney. One day while waiting for a ferry, I noticed that there were many small cylindrical holes between the surface I stood on and the ocean beneath. Putting my ear to one of these openings revealed a wonderful resonant sound (compression wave) caused by the waves underneath suddenly closing the bottom end of the cylindrical hole. As the position of each hole would be in a different relationship to the phase of the waves below, I imagined simultaneously recording many of these holes. Later, one quiet evening, an ABC Outside Broadcast van pulled up to Kirribilli Wharf and I positioned microphones at the openings of eight cylindrical holes. The resulting tape is played here out of eight loudspeakers as a sound sculpture.
Acoustical Views was realized as a sound sculpture on the facade of the Art Gallery of NSW during the Sydney Biennale of 1988. This sound sculpture was inspired by the visual panorama of Sydney to be seen from the facade of the Art Gallery. I was interested in the fact that normally we can see much further than we can hear. I wanted to create a situation in which visitors to the Art Gallery could hear as far as they could see. Acoustical Views had many correspondences to viewing various distant points in the surrounding landscape. A live radio performance mix of Acoustical Views was realized on ABC-FM’s ‘Listening Room’.”1
1 Bill Fontana, excerpt from the inlay of the CD Bill Fontana. Australian Sound Sculptures, Edition Block, 1990.