Composure commissions
Deadline 12 December 07
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Primal Soundings: A new sound work by Bill Fontana
Commissioned by FuseLeeds04 in collaboration with Lumen
1 March 2004 - present | Victoria Gardens/Leeds City Art Gallery, The Headrow

Over the last twenty years, American artist Bill Fontana has been exploring the nature of space, music and technology through a series of major projects in cities as including New York, Paris, San Francisco and Venice. In a major new public art commission for Leeds, he has been invited to create a sound installation inside and outside Leeds City Art Gallery, using the sounds and landscapes of Yorkshire as his inspiration.

Loudspeakers mounted on the exterior of the Gallery will transform the space below in Victoria Gardens with the sounds of the River Aire as it passes through the Dark Arches in Leeds. Inside the Art Gallery itself the sound sculpture will extend over the ground and first floors and include geophysical sounds recorded by means of seismic sensors installed throughout Yorkshire, the sounds of phased wind turbines on the Yorkshire moors and a live relay of the bell mechanism in the Leeds Town Hall tower.

Live microphone and accelerometers installed on the clock mechanism at Leeds Town Hall

Artists' statement
"The creation of this sound sculpture coincides with new developments in my work that synthesize my interests in the musical, sculptural and phenomenological aspects of sound as a contemporary medium. Ever since I began to call my installations sound sculptures thirty years ago, people have wondered whether this work belongs to music or art. It was considered outside of music because there was no score, it was not a performance, and all of the sounds were found. It was not considered art, because there is not a retinal visual element; it is only sound, space and time. This sense of being on the outside edge of the expectations of the art and music world created a situation where the motivating force in me was not success in these domains and their markets, but a deep interest in the phenomenology of sound and its emerging quality as the universal medium that not only belongs to music and art, but to the biological and physical sciences, architecture, urban planning and history. During the last few years, I explored these ideas in an ongoing seminar called Acoustic Phenomenology at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. This project in Leeds is the most developed of my recent works to explore these ideas. I am also very pleased that Primal Soundings is part of a contemporary music festival, FuseLeeds04 and is also part of the permanent collection of Leeds City Gallery, a visual arts museum.

The Sound Sources
My acoustic journey in Leeds began with the Dark Arches, a magical Victorian space of four parallel brick tunnels that one gazes into from Dark Neville Street to view and hear the River Aire surging through, as trains periodically resonate above you. In Primal Soundings, I am using recordings of the River Aire passing through the tunnel as one of the sound sources. The principal method of collecting this sound was with a hydrophone, picking up the sounds when the current of the River Aire was especially intense. This resulted in a water sound that was very musical and textured, quite different from the roaring natural white noise of the river. This is mixed in such a way as to create an acoustic model of what the moving water in the tunnels would sound like if one had multiple hydrophones in different locations.

Leaving Leeds by car and heading North to the Yorkshire Dales National Park, I went in search of the source of the River Aire. During these journeys I became interested in the geology of this landscape and presence of wind in these wind open spaces. At the Earth Sciences Department of Leeds University, I was given access to a network of 6 seismometers that are listening for earthquakes under Yorkshire. These also pick up mysterious low frequency sound continuums called microseisms. These come from the accumulative impact from the waves of the various seas surrounding the U.K. that are pounding on the coast and resonating deep underground (other events such as heavy wind through trees and intense traffic can also generate microseisms). The recordings were made with a direct connection to the FM radio signals coming into the University. With the carrier frequencies filtered away, I am left with a remarkable percussive low frequency sound that must be heard from a good sub-woofer. The Yorkshire countryside has many wind farms, one of the most interesting of which is in the hills overlooking Chelker Reservoir, where there are 4 two-blade turbines producing a hypnotic pulsating sound. For this sound sculpture, two of these turbines were recorded simultaneously at close range, so that the whirring, whining, whooshing and whistling of these giant blades phases in musical asynchronicity.

The fourth element in this sound sculpture explores the measurement and sounding of actual and historical time in Leeds. The clockwork and its hour bell have been measuring the passage of time since 1859. Think of the transformations Leeds has seen in this period of 146 years. In Primal Soundings this mechanism and the hour bell are the only live elements, which are transmitted directly to the Gallery, as it makes no sense to work with such a sound using recordings. The fact that the entrance to the Gallery has good views of the clock also makes it quite interesting to use live.

The Architectural Translation of Sound
The realisation of this sound sculpture at the Leeds City Gallery is a journey through the museum. The mix of underwater sounds from the River Aire is heard on the façade moving in dynamic spatial waves that soften the traffic noise on the Headrow. Sometimes this wave becomes silent on the façade and passes into the Museum, where it is heard on a parallel wall that had originally been the outer wall of the museum. Sometimes when the door opens and someone is moving through the entrance, they will experience this underwater wave moving outside of or entering the building.

Opening the door to enter the Gallery visitors will hear the live sound of the clockwork of the Leeds Town Hall ticking with mechanical clarity in the square resonant entrance. If one happens to pass through this space on the hour, when the clock bell is sounding, visitors standing in front of the Gallery can hear this hour bell every 60 minutes, naturally arriving there at the speed of sound. If during the ringing cycle a visitor enters the Gallery, they will hear the live transmitted sound of the bell at the speed of light. During the hour strokes this will momentarily create the acoustic sensation of entering the future, or in the case of leaving the gallery, moving into the acoustic past, as there will be a noticeable delay between the speeds of sound and light.

Upstairs in the Silver Gallery, the seismic sounds are played from two sub-woofers so that this low frequency sound slowly oscillates between the two polarities of this rectangular space, becoming silent for short intervals of time in order to activate low frequency resonances in this space. Two other full range speakers placed at the polarities of this space play the asynchronous wind turbines. These will sometimes move and become silent, leaving only the low frequency microseisms to resonate the space. At a future time this gallery may open to the adjacent terrace where loudspeakers playing the underwater waves are located. In its current condition with terrace access restricted, these underwater sounds may softly penetrate the walls of the silver gallery during quieter moments in this space." (Bill Fontana, San Francisco, 2004)

Purchased by the Contemporary Art Society Special Collection Scheme for the permanent collection of Leeds Museums and Galleries, with funds from the Arts Council Lottery, 2004. Supported by Aurora Show Control, Meyer Sound and Pro Audio Systems.