LANDSCAPE SCULPTURE WITH FOG HORNSBILL FONTANANOTESFROM THE 1982
VINYL RELEASE BY
BILL FONTANA

BackgroundAs a composer, I have been concernedwith the exploration of musical formin the everyday sounds that occur in avariety of environments. The central aesthetic issues are: 1) how is a given sounddefined by a volume of space; and 2) how
do the acoustic conditions of a given
space define a sound? These concerns
have led me to work with pure sound asa sculptural medium.
The sound processes that are thebasis of my recent projects are environmental, natural and man-made.
My method has been to infer a time
structure created by the simultaneouscomparison of the same sound processfrom many points in a landscape. The
resulting structure is an imaginary landscape, created by reducing the real space
between sounds in the landscape, whilebringing together the real time between
these sounds.

In 1976, while living and working inAustralia, I began to make eight-channel field recordings of environmental
sounds. This proved an ideal way to notate and present the unique sound forms
generated by the landscape. In 1978,
these eight-channel field recordings
were presented as an exhibition, calledSound Sculpture, at the National Galleryof Victoria in Melbourne.
In 1980, I began working with outdoor sculpture sites to explore the realtime acoustic relationships existing between a sculpture site and its surrounding landscape. These installations wererealized with the technical assistance of
the Bell System affiliates. Eight Microphones were installed within the landscape. Then, sounds of the landscapewere recreated at the sculpture site.
In 1982, I created my first set of radio sound sculptures with the support of
KQED-FM in San Francisco and National Public Radio’s The Sunday Show. Oneof these works was a live radio version ofLandscape Sculpture With Fog Horns.

Landscape Sculpture With Fog Horns
Installation Version, 1981 (19:50)
The sculpture site of this version was theEast Wall of Pier 2, Fort Mason Centerin San Francisco; and was created for
the New Music America ’81 Festival. At
the sculpture site, listeners walked along
the 600 foot pier, on a trajectory towards
Angel Island (3 miles away). At the endof the pier, all of San Francisco Bay isvisible. For 300 feet of this walk, listeners would pass under a sequence of eightloudspeakers. Each of these played a live
broadcast of ambient sound from each ofeight different and distant microphone
locations around San Francisco Bay.
They were:
Point Blunt, Angel Island
West Garrison, Angel Island
Treasure Island
San Francisco Yacht Harbor
Fort Point
Legion of Honor
Cliff House

Acoustically, all of these locations
have one fact in common: they can allhear various combinations of the samefog horns. Since the speed of sound is
1,127 feet per second, and the average distance the sound of a fog horn can travel
is about 5 miles, a complex configurationof echo patters and sound delays was created. At the sculpture site, these delays
were acoustically mixed in real time,with the fog horn sounds that are part of
the normal ambience of Pier 2.
The Coast Guard Light List
Caution: Fog signals depend upon thetransmission of sound through air. As
aids to navigation they have certain
inherent defects that should be considered. Sound travels through the air in avariable and frequently unpredictablemanner.

It has been clearly established that:
Fog signals are heard at greatly varying
distances and that the distance at which
fog signals can be heard may vary with thebearing of the signal and may be different
on occasions.
Under certain atmospheric conditions,when a fog signal has a combination highand low tone, it is not unusual for for one of
the tones to be inaudible.
The intensity of the sound emitted by a fog
signal may be greater at a distance than in
the immediate proximity.
Fog signals are distinguished bytheir characteristics as specified foreach signal. The signal characteristic is
the phase relationship of the recurringsound emissions. Fog signals on fixedstations produce a specific number of
blasts and silent periods each minute,to provide positive identification. The
following is a list of the characteristics
specified for the main fog horns in San
Francisco Bay.

Point Bonita Light, 1855 and 1877 –2 blasts every 30 seconds: a 2-second
blast, followed by a 2-second silence,
followed by a 2-second blast, followed by
24 second silence.
Mile Rock Light, 1906 and 1966 –1 blast every 15 seconds: a 2-second blast,
followed by a 13-second silence.
Point Diablo Light, 1923 – 1 blast every
30 seconds: a 3-second blast rolled by a
27-second silence.
Golden Gate Bridge, Mid-Channel Fog
Signal, 1937 – 2 blasts every 40 seconds:
a 1-second blast, followed by a 2-second
silence, followed by a 1-second blast,
followed by a 36-second silence.
Golden Gate Bridge, South Pier Light, 1937
– 2 horns sound simultaneously with 2
blasts every 20 seconds: a 2-second blast
followed by 18-second silence.
Alcatraz South Fog Signal, 1972 – 1 blast
every 30 seconds: a 3-second blast
followed by 27-second silence.

Alcatraz North Fog Signal, 1901 and 1913
– 2 blasts every 30 seconds: a 2-second
blast followed by a 2-second silence,
followed by a 2-second blast, followed by
2-second silence.
Point Blunt Light – 1 blast every 15
seconds: a 2-second blast followed by a
13-second silence.

BILL FONTANALANDSCAPE
SCULPTURE WITH
FOG HORNSJENNIFER LUCY ALLAN

The foghorn was invented, the story
goes, in Canada in 1853, by a man named
Robert Foulis. Foulis was a Scottish
widower who moved to Saint John inthe Bay of Fundy, where he remarried
and had a daughter. One foggy evening,
he went for a walk along the shore, andas he walked, he could hear the soundof his daughter’s piano playing drifting
across the shore. As he listened, henoticed that the lower notes soundedlouder than the higher, and that they
were carrying better through the fog.
The piano’s low notes guided him home,and from this, he was inspired him tobuild a foghorn.
Foulis’s horn was installed on
Partridge Island in 1859, but he failed topatent his invention, and died in poverty
less than a decade later. It was others– including a particularly enterprisinginventor called Celadon Leeds Daboll –who made patents on horns for sounding
in fog. In the next 100 years the soundspread around the world, particularlyaround the Bay Area, where the ocean’snarrow breach of the mountain range
produces dense fogs that move fasterthan a person can run.
By the second half of the 20th Century, there was cacophony of foghorns
in the Bay Area, and these sounds had
become as much a part of San Francisco’s identity as the fog they sounded for– foghorns had become shorthand for thecity. At one time there were as many as
91 sound signals around the Bay, including horns, sirens and bells. However, as
navigational technology at sea advanced
and boats no longer needed sound fororientation, these coastal sounds werealso becoming obsolete. So when Bill
Fontana came to record these sounds forhis 1981 work Landscape Sculpture with
Foghorns, he was taking a snapshot of notjust a landscape, but a moment in history
that was soon to be lost.
Fontana captured the way the soundof the horns were shaped by the topography of the Bay Area, by placing microphones at eight sites around San Francisco – Lincoln Park, China Beach, Point

Lobos, Fort Point, the Yacht Harbor in
San Francisco, Point Stuart and Point
Blunt on Angel Island, and on Treasure
Island – these picked up the sounds ofthe horns and played them at speakers
on Pier 2 at The Fort Mason Centre. The
distances between the sites meant thatthe sounds overlapped, were broadcast
with varying delays created by the speed
the sounds travelled. The intention was
to “hear the whole landscape,” and to do
this he uses sound as material. The titleof the work is quite literal – the soundsof the foghorns as they pass over the Bay
Area have a form no physical sculpture
can possess, taking on an aural image
in and of the landscape. In these echoes
and resonances are the shapes of theland itself, the horn’s sounds like plaster
poured into a topographic mould.
In the decade after Fontana’s
installation many horns were deactivated or removed, without much fanfare
of consultation. However, in the 1990s,
when people began to realise the sounds
they associated with home were soon tobecome extinct, a minor media storm
blew up in the local newspapers. Wayne
Wheeler, the founder and president of
the US Lighthouse Society, said thatwhen newspapers began reporting theloss of the Bay’s foghorns, his phonerang off the hook with people wanting
to save them. He was fond of referencing Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon
when interviewed, invoking Sam Spadechasing a crook down Kearny Street,and how it wouldn’t be the same scene
if it wasn’t soundtracked by foghorns.
Wheeler told the San Francisco Examiner at the time: “It’s so much of San
Francisco’s background. You’ve heard ofnational historic landmarks. Well, this isa national historic soundmark.”
There are now just a few small electric horns left around the bay, although
the Golden Gate Bridge’s iconic horns
remain. So when we listen to Landscape
Sculpture With Fog Horns what we arehearing, are ghosts. It captures a soundworld largely from the past, but one thatstill resonates as part of the city’s identity.

The blasts of foghorns heard on
this record can orient us in the ways werelate to sound in the environment, andraises questions about what it means toremove, restore or protect these sounds.
Sound, historically and culturally
speaking, is a multi-track happening,and sounds from one place can make itinto another, through installations andreissues of work like Fontana’s Landscape Sculpture With Fog Horns is notjust a document of an installation, but areflection on what it means for a soundto belong to a place. Listening doesn’t
just tell you about a history of sound, butalso about the shape of a place, throughcapturing the Bay in the melancholic bellowing, beeps, and moos of the foghorns
that have come to define it.

CONVERSATIONBILL FONTANASTUART DEMPSTERCHARLES AMIRKHANIANCharles Amirkhanian (CA): Bill, could
we go back in time to the genesis ofLandscape Sculpture with Fog Horns anddiscuss how you actually approachedthat piece and why that piece?
Bill Fontana (BF): Well this was 1981,
I had been living in Australia, and I
moved to San Francisco in 1978. This period of work in Australia was a real turning point to me because I was doing a lotof work with ABC in Australia and hadaccess to what seemed like really cool
technology like outside broadcast trucks
with 8 and 6 inch recorders. I was able
to explore the idea of sound mapping by
setting up arrays of microphones in anenvironment to map the environmentand complexity of sounds and I became
really interested in a philosophical ideathat was asking myself a rhetoricalquestion like “what is this sound that
I’m hearing now?” and the answer, therhetorical answer was “is this sound any
sound, the composite of all the possible
ways to hear it?”

When you apply the concept, if you
think about that literally, all the possible
ways there are to hear [a sound], and you
take a sound that occupies a significant
volume of space, that answer becomesreally interesting. It starts to get into
the concept of multidimensionality, andthe idea that if you take a sound like
foghorns at the Golden Gate Bridge andyou listen to those sounds from many
vantage points, some quite a distanceaway, the sound of the horn is arriving
at a different time, and you bring that
all together. I was just really obsessedwith that way of thinking about theenvironment. So when I came to San
Francisco, I was absolutely captivatedwith the sounds of the fog horns on theGolden Gate Bridge just imagining what
this would be. Then this opportunity
came along with New Music America
and I had the idea of siting the work in
Fort Mason so that you were a part of theenvironment that the work was being
generated by. It was in some ways, thefirst work of its time that successfully

explored this idea of real time mappingof the sculptural dimensions of sounds.
The way it was done was with analogue telephone lines that were supposed
to be broadcast quality that were used forremote radio broadcasting at the time. I
didn’t get permission to put microphones
in these places, the remote places. It was
really kind of an amazing process.
CA: Was one of these microphones on
the Farallon Islands way out to sea?
BF: That was much later, that was for
SFMOMA in 1987 when I did a piecethat was a live duet between the Golden
Gate Bridge and the Farallon Islands.
That wasn’t one microphone, it was 6
microphones on the Farallons.
CA: What was the most difficult installation of a telephone line for this particularpiece for the Golden Gate Bridge foghorns? Were they all on the bridge? The
foghorns?
BF: No, there are two horns on thebridge: the Itban horn and the southpier horn, the famous sound you reallyassociate with the Golden Gate Bridge.
The image on the cover of the CD is thesouth pier foghorn which is the one thatreally travels long distances, but you
have other foghorns in the San Franciscobay. Near the bridge there are some on
Alcatraz, there are some on Angel Island,
there’s the Point Bonita lighthouse, so
there are other foghorns that enter into
this sometimes.
CA: There must have been a process ofsetting up the microphones, listening
and adjusting or did you just place themand get what you wanted right away?
BF: There was a lot of listening andtuning the position of the microphones
and the microphones I was using. These
were outdoor environments that had a
lot of humidity and I didn’t have the budget in 1981 to buy expensive condenser
microphones to put out there. I ended up
using eight Electro-Voice 635’s [laughs]
and there was a guy who built portablepreamps for these that had a balanced

output and a terminal that would connect to phone lines so we had a few of
those built.
CA: [EV 635s] were sort of indestructible
microphones that a rock musician could
throw on the ground and pick up andstill use.
BF: Well, they were okay. They wereomnidirectional dynamic microphones
and when you’re listening to a soundlike a foghorn, they’re fine. When I did
the piece in 1987 for SFMOMA with
the Farallon Islands and the Golden
Gate Bridge I exclusively used the same
635s. The funny thing was that when
we went out to the Farallon Islands
to install these microphones, the waythat the signal got sent back to the city
was a microwave antenna that was on
top of the coast guard lighthouse andthere was a multiplexor that would
encode 6 channels of audio and video
bandwidth. Working on the islands wasa real adventure. Not only getting there
but the fact that island was inhabited bythis vast population of seagulls, it wasowned by the seagulls. And they werepretty aggressive, they didn’t like the factthat I was walking around on this island
looking for a place to put a microphone.
They were pretty hostile, they would aim
shit at me as I was walking around so it
was necessary to wear a cheap raincoatand hat to keep the shit off my skin. It
was pretty interesting.
CA: Did Cage teach any classes while
you were studying at The New School?
BF: He’d come in every once and a while
to give a lecture but I developed a pretty
good relationship with him by just goingto play chess with him and to just talk.
I think what was important to me in
New York at this time was just that thesepeople took me seriously.
CA: A novel feeling. [both laugh]
BF: New York was really important
to me and in the early 70’s I moved toToronto because I got a job as musical director of a small theater. I’d often drive to
New York to connect [with] the networkof people I had there. The first streaming
sound sculptures I made were in New
York at a place called the Experimental
Intermedia Foundation. I was obsessedwith the idea, I started thinking about
the meaning of the word sculpture- aphysical embodiment of an aspect of
the human condition, and the humancondition I was interested in embodying
was listening. I got fascinated with themusical properties of the resonance ofobjects, and so the first live streaming
installations I made were at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation where I
took some resonant objects and put themon the roof wired with some lavaliermicrophones inside the objects. We’d justhear these resonant filters to the ambient
sounds of the city.
CA: Is music really a universal language
and is what you make music?
BF: I hope so, but it’s not for me to decidethat. There’s a difference between one’s
intention and one’s effects but within mybubble of the world, I think of the works

as being very musical. I think the general kind of aesthetic that I’ve developed,
which relates to zen, has a desire to deconstruct someone’s perception of linear
time and to create a sense of internalpresences that transcends the normal
sense of time passing. That’s somethingthat I really love about the foghorn
piece being on the side of Fort Mason[in 2020] because it is a recording fromthe past but it’s somehow like it neverstopped. It’s really weird now becausethat building is completely surroundedby chainlink fence and you hear the 8
Meyer speakers along the wall of thebuilding where they would have beenoriginally. So you can hear this foghorn
piece sounding out from behind thischainlink fence and it’s almost like thebuilding is kind of, calling out, it’s weird.

rated performance into my work is an
exhibition I did in 1988 at the Berkeley
Art Museum that Constance Lewallen
was the curator of. It was a piece inwhich I installed loudspeakers along the
façade of the building into the garden
area. I had microphones placed throughthe UC Berkeley campus and I had written these minimal compositions for the
carillon that were intended to be theseminimalist layers that if you heard themfrom distances at the same time theywould form this composite sound image.
And when the bells weren’t ringing, youwere just hearing all the ambient soundsof the campus.

CA: Do you have many pieces where
someone like Stuart brings an instrument and interacts with the installation?

CA: How did you work with Stuart
on this piece? I remember being there
and thinking it was a perfect marriage
between an instrumental performanceand installation. And Stuart gave it someshape because he started very quietly
and intensified as the work went on.

BF: Actually not. That was really special. The only other times I’ve incorpo-

BF: He did, we had some really interesting interactions behind that piece. It wasreally exciting to get to work with himon that project.
CA: [The performance] was heard
around the United States which was unusual because the NPR satellite was fairly new and the idea of doing New Musicon the satellite was unprecedented. But
since we had the New Music America
festival that year in San Francisco, we
had curators from all over the country
who lobbied to have the funds to buytime on the satellite to do live broadcastsof every night of the seven nights of thefestival. Stuart, let’s talk a little bit more
about your experience with Fontana. Did
you encounter the installation and thendecide that would be fun to improvise
with it or how did that work out?
Stewart Dempster (SD): [Bill] invited me
over. I’d never met him before. Many days
before this event invited me over to [Fort
Mason] to see what he thought I could dowith it. And I was so taken. I mean the
10-second reverberation that was in there
was a nicer reverberation in some ways

than Grace Cathedral. It just felt good. I
guess the idea that you could go aroundanywhere that was just cement floors wasreally raw. So he showed me different
things and I went up into his room where
he could phone in to the actual foghorns.
They were the old dial phones then, andit was just beautiful to hear. Of course theday of the performance, it was a sunny
day so the foghorns weren’t running. We
had to use a recording. It was still nice,but I hadn’t met him before that and I
was really taken with how he done andorganized all this. And of course theinvitation was really special.
CA: What instruments did you use?
SD: I used trombone and the big brass
didgeridoo that I had set up to thefoghorn pitches. I knew what they were,and it fit the didgeridoo perfectly, those
overtones. Then the garden hose for the
relatively extended thing with the Doppler effect from my twirling it around. I
had a small conch that ended up on thesegment that’s going to be on the CD.

CA: When you did the performance,
where were you standing and was therea live audience?
SD: Yes. It was about 70 people and they
got into this kind of moving around likeit’s a big Tai Chi event. You’d feel thismovement. It was absolutely gorgeous.
Nothing I organized or anything.
CA: You’re under estimating yourselfYou were moving them around.
SD: Well, I was doing whatever I was doing and they just really got into it. It wassuch a wonderful exchange. There was a‘swoosh swoosh’ sound of people’s shoes
scraping on the rough cement and that
seemed to be kind of a lovely percussion.
It was this gentle [sound], like somebody
playing brushes, snare drum brushes, 70
people having their shoes sounding likelittle snare drum brushes. I don’t know
how much of that got on the recording
necessarily because I’m pretty loud. So it
may have been recorded at a low enoughlevel that I don’t remember hearing it.

CA: In retrospect, Bill, why was it thatyou didn’t find other similar collaborations with musicians and your ambient
sound installations?
BF: That’s an interesting question
Charles, I think especially when I wasyounger, when I have an idea, I become
very obsessed with my idea. I thinkmaybe an issue for me was that I wasinterested in this idea of a momentthat doesn’t stop and the problem withmusic performance was that at times it
felt that there was a linear process that,
especially in my younger years, didn’t
work so well in my aesthetic. What wasso special about Dempster where he felt
like a very sympathetic person there.
CA: Also, there are the limitations of aperson where they can’t be there at an
installation for 24 straight hours, or atleast most can’t, and there’s an elementof control. I think you like to control,
even though you have a lot of sounds
coming in that you can’t control, youdon’t know what’s going to be comingin when precisely, you still have more
control over how the overall aesthetic
will be of the installation throughout
the duration, you don’t have to deal withpeople who are getting creative on you.
(laughs) Stuart, when you’re doing an
improvisation like that, there are pointsof tension and resolution that naturally
emerge but you don’t want to have aresolution too early, or your performanceis over. So how does that work out?
SD: We organized it so that Bill would
have large sections that were for him. I
haven’t listened to the two-hour thing fora long time but there were radio signals
coming from somewhere. [Bill] thought
it was from someplace other than his
equipment, so that it shows up in the in
the excerpt that’s going to be on the CD. I
didn’t have any electronics that I used.
BF: It was a remarkable experience
because it was something different andunusual, to combine a sound sculpture
with a musical performance. I was so

impressed, you were able to really makesense out of it. It was very memorable.
CA: Was that long duration something
new for you?
SD: Well, I can’t say for sure. I didn’t
have anything I had to think about
except pacing and I wanted to leave a lotof space for Bill to have certain things
that he was doing. I mean, I think we
had a plan that way so that he’d havesome space for the fog horns. I remember being so incredibly admiring of you,managing to work with all these governmental agencies that just that just blew
me away, still blows me away.
BF: I remember going through myarchive and one of the documents- because for every location that I installed alive microphone I had to sign a contractone of the locations was in the Presidio,
which at that time was the US Army.
I had a signed contract with the Army
Communications Command.
SD: And then the Coast Guard…

BF: And the Coast Guard right, and thecity, National Park Service…
SD: Fort Mason probably two separate
agencies at that time.
CA: That’s amazing. A big part of public
art is these logistical things that artists
aren’t normally called upon to executeand probably many of them wish to execute themselves after they get into it.
BF: Over the years. I’ve had a lot of projects that involve getting permissions for
microphones in a wide variety of spaces.
When communicating and working withpeople at these institutions; I try to come
off not so much as an artist but more likea scientist. Talk about it more in scientificterms and point at it as an experiment.
That was a useful language model.
CA: The only difference in this case is
you’re dealing with a communication
tool which is supposed to alert ships. If
you’re experimenting with that couldn’t
you cause some difficulties?
BF: Well, the argument was that I’m
not physically altering the signals; what

I’m doing is mapping their ability totravel through the acoustic space of San
Francisco Bay, a sound map of the bay,
and my hope is that this as an interesting
research article.
CA: So you’re not altering the functionof the signals.
BF: No, not at all. They’re still audible to
the right people.
SD: It was just so grand that all thosedial phones were available.
BF: So that it was a great thrill of my life
to be crawling around on the parts of thebridge that most people never get to see. I
had a relationship with the electrical shopof the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d call themup and they would turn on the fog horns.
CA: That’s pretty good.
BF: I don’t think I ever in my life felt like
I’ve had so much power as I did with that.
This interview has been edited for content,
clarity and space.