Bill Fontana
American (Cleveland, Ohio, 1947)Sound Sculpture with a Sequence of Level Crossings
In Sound Sculpture with a Sequence of Level Crossings, Bill Fontana creates an acoustical portrait of the Amtrak and Southern Pacific rail lines in Berkeley using recordings made by eight microphones positioned along the tracks.
The train sounds are composed to pass stereophonically through the museum gallery, simulating the auditory phenomena as they might be experienced at the actual site. Viewers are able to construct a spatial map of the original landscape based on the Doppler effects generated by the trains' movement to and fro.
Keywords
loudspeakers, skylights, ceilings, rooms, railroad trains, sounds
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