All bells are ears: about Silent Echoes. Notre-Dame by Bill Fontana
Bastien Gallet
On the south terrace of the fifth floor of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, American artist Bill
Fontana makes audible bells that a fire has silenced: those of Notre-Dame. This installation ofremarkable finesse moves the bells without almost touching them, capturing the silent
vibrations that resonate in secret. The sound space he creates blends with the sounds of acity that we learn to listen to in a different way, from an impossible point of hearing, that often large metal ears.

One day, during an interview that gave rise to a famous book, John Cage showed DanielCharles the ashtray that was placed, one imagines, on a nearby table:“Look at this ashtray. It’s in a state of vibration. We’re sure of that, and the physicist canprove it to us. But we can’t hear those vibrations. When I went into the anechoic chamber I
could hear myself. Well, now, instead of listening to myself, I want to listen to this ashtray.
But I won’t strike it as I would a percussion instrument. I am going to listen to its inner life
thanks to a suitable technology, which surely will not have been designed for thatpurpose.”*Cage's discovery that everything continuously emitted sound, however faintly audible,
represented the acme of what Douglas Kahn has called his “panaurality”**, which he says ischaracterised by these two concomitant propositions: all sound and always sound. In otherwords, everything always emits a sound and therefore everything can be heard. His 1952
anechoic chamber experiment was just one piece of the puzzle. He deduced that sound wasalways (silence does not exist). But for sound to be everywhere, everything had to vibrate,even the inert ashtray. Cage never carried out this project of listening to the inaudible
vibrations of matter, but others undertook it after him.
In Silent Echoes. Notre-Dame, an installation that can be seen and heard on the southterrace of the Centre Pompidou, Bill Fontana—who was a student of John Cage's in New
York in the 1960s (at the New School for Social Research)—projects onto thirty loudspeakers
the vibrations of the ten bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral, whose two towers can be seen in
the distance above the roofs of Saint-Merri church. Like Cage's ashtray, but certainly in amore harmonic way, the bells of Notre-Dame vibrate continuously, under the effect of theambient sounds, the wind and the solid waves that pass through the cathedral. In order tobe audible, these minute vibrations must be captured, and this requires a technical tool that
did not exist in the 1970s: the seismic accelerometer. Used by engineers and seismologists
to measure the speed of propagation of vibrations in a material, it is used here to capture
those that pass through the cathedral's bells. Transmitted to a computer, they areprocessed, composed and spatialized in collaboration with Thomas Goepfer (computermusic designer) on Max/MSP—a software program that was developed at Ircam, a partnerin the project—and then projected onto the installation's loudspeakers.

What do one hear when one walks on the Centre's terrace? We are on the fifth floor, thefloor of the Museum of Modern Art, above the Stravinsky fountain and the pedestrianized
Rue Saint-Merri. The east side overlooks the busy Rue du Renard. The west side faces thesquare and its improvised concerts. All around this rectangle, thirty loudspeakers project theinaudible sounds of the bells. This is what you hear at first. Bell sounds without attack,resonances of different pitches that do not fill the space but, strangely, compose it. It is not
immediately perceptible. You have to walk around a bit to realize this, listen to the way theresonances are distributed, how they move from one area of the terrace to another, how
they become more and less numerous, more and less present, listen between theresonances to the sounds coming from the street, the fountain, the square. The installation
draws a fluctuating, evolving space, which is superimposed on the place without erasing it,
which composes with it as much as it composes itself. Bill Fontana does not just broadcast
the sounds of the bells, he uses the thirty loudspeakers at his disposal to construct their newspatialization. The work is multi-layered: the bells are not all heard at the same time, weperceive four then eight then five then ten then seven (the tuning changes every 90
seconds), which gives the impression of a variable and constantly changing saturation of thesound space; the resonances move from one loudspeaker to another in a random manner
but without any sound movement being able to be established; every other loudspeaker isaffected by a 500 ms delay, which produces a variation in sound density and, in a barely
perceptible way, something like a rhythm within the installation.
Listening to Silent Echoes means, without contradiction, listening to the city through it, but it
also means listening to how it affects it, slipping into its interstices to recompose it. Whenyou approach the east side, the sound of cars almost overlays the resonance. When you
move away from it, the continuous roar of traffic is transformed into discreet and disparate
bursts of voices, music, sirens. But that is not all. For we do not only listen to the resonancesand behind them the sounds of the place, we also listen through them to the sounds that thebells capture and filter, those that, because they are at the right frequencies, make themring in a tiny, inaudible, way. By listening to the bells, we also listen to what they hear, theplace around them, another place that adds to the first, that duplicates it or echoes it. The
impression is strange. Does this siren come from the street or from the bell, from here or
there, do I hear it with my ears or through the vibrating metal of the instrument? The city is
twice heard and rearranged, twice new.
One of the beauties of this work is that it operates live, barely delayed (one second): we hear
the bells as they were vibrating a moment ago and through them the sounds of there
displaced here, relocated on the southern terrace of the Centre. Knowing this, that these
unrecognizable sounds are the actual resonances of the bells of Notre-Dame heard live, isessential to the installation. Its concept, to make inaudible vibrations audible and movethem elsewhere, to respatialize them elsewhere, is inseparable from its percept—to hearbells here that are inaudible there—and affect—to listen to bells that no longer ring and will
not ring again until the cathedral's renovation is complete. The fire that destroyed its spireand framework spared its towers and bells. They had to be silenced to realize that they hadalways been listening to Paris in secret.

This is not Bill Fontana's first installation in Paris. In 1994, on the occasion of the fiftiethanniversary of the Allied landing, he created Sound Island. Forty-eight loudspeakers on thefaçade of the Arc de Triomphe projected sounds captured live and slightly delayed on thebeaches of Normandy. The sounds of the sea: waves, wind. Their frequency amplitude issuch that they cover all the others, even those of the cars in the Place de l'Etoile, which theinstallation paradoxically rendered silent (what is known in acoustics as a “mask effect”).
With Sound Island, Bill Fontana erased the place, almost as radically as Christo and JeanneClaude would do almost fifty years later by covering the Arc de Triomphe with woven fabric.
By displacing the sounds of the sea, he also displaced the monument that made them heard.
The paradoxical silence that occurred was only the consequence of a deeper rupture: that ofaudiovisual naturalness. Suddenly, we could no longer hear what we saw. Suddenly, the Arcde Triomphe was torn from its place, out of the ground. A double disjunction: that of thesounds separated from their source, that of the monument detached from its ordinary
environment. In 1976, while recording soundscapes in Australia, Bill Fontana experienced atotal solar eclipse that silenced all voices:“This recording was seminal for my work because a total eclipse is always conceived of as
being a visual experience, and such a compelling sonic result was indicative of how ignored
the acoustic sensibility is in our normal experience of the world. From this moment on, myartistic mission consciously became the transformation and deconstruction of the visual withthe aural.”In Silent Echoes, Bill Fontana takes up the process but enriches it with a new gesture thatchanges its meaning: he no longer just moves sounds, he also moves ears—resonant objects
that he transforms into ears for us. The difference is important. The visitor on the fifth floor
south terrace of the Centre Pompidou hears the bells, but he also hears what they would
hear if they could. Bill Fontana makes it possible for us to adopt this impossible point ofhearing: listening to Paris from the towers of Notre-Dame, filtered through the uniqueacoustic profiles of the cathedral’s ten bells.
This installation is not the first time he has transformed resonant objects into capturedevices. Silent Echoes is the title of a series he inaugurated in 2009 in Japan by capturing thesilent vibrations of the bells of five Buddhist temples in Kyoto. In Harmonic Bridge in 2006,
he brought the vibrations of London's Millennium Bridge into the Turbine Hall of the nearby
Tate Modern. The earliest experiment dates from 1972. On the roof of a New York gallery,
he placed glass bottles and bells with microphones recording the vibrations: Sound Sculpture
with Resonators. The captured sounds were broadcast live with little delay into the gallery
space.
Bill Fontana is no stranger to the field of sound ecology and the practice of field recording,from which he borrows some of the means, but the devices that he puts in place transformthe issues at stake. Like these artists, he records and gives voice to sound ambiences, butwhat interests him is less their restitution as such than the displacement that this restitution
operates, which can go as far as vertigo. Hearing the sounds of the Millennium Bridge in theTurbine Hall of the Tate Modern had this effect. They could have come from the place, anold power station converted into a museum, but they came from the bridge and to becomeaware of them meant to remember the steps we had taken on it, the wind that made it
tremble, the sky and the Thames, it was to be on the bridge again but in a completely
different way: that of being in the intimacy of the tremors that pass through it, which by jolts
filled the space, touched the bodies. Bill Fontana exacerbates the principle of recording in
general: to record is to displace. But perhaps should we go one step further: listening isalready a form of displacement, of which we have largely lost awareness. Through hisinstallations, Bill Fontana makes listening what it is: a sensory system (two ears on eitherside of a head perched on a body moving in space) that makes sensitive what we cannot seeor touch.
On 8 June 2018, Michael Gendreau, a Californian sound artist and acoustical engineer, gavea concert in Saint-Merry church. In reality, it was less a concert than a vibration of the place
itself, which became, for an hour, the main instrument of the artist-musician. Suddenly, thechurch became a body among others, linked to the rest of the world by the countless waves
that Michael Gendreau made audible or that he projected in order to make it vibrate, to findits resonant frequencies, to make a sonic and musical pas de deux with it. What Michael
Gendreau undertook for an hour in the church of Saint-Merry, Bill Fontana does more
discreetly but no less radically with Notre-Dame: he makes audible what goes through it andconsequently that it is, as well, a part of the world.
First published in AOC media on July 1st 2022, translated by the author
https://aoc.media/critique/2022/06/30/toutes-les-cloches-sont-des-oreilles-sur-silent-echoes-notredame-de-bill-fontana/* For the birds, John Cage in Conversation with Daniel Charles, Marion Boyars, London: Boston, 1981,p. 220-221.
** “Thus, sound was no longer tied to events but existed as a continuous state as it resonated fromeach and every atom. […] Everything always made a sound, and everything could be heard; all soundand always sound paralleled panaurality.”, Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in
the Arts, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 159.
*** Quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum, New York,2006, p. 233.