UP AND RUNNING
Semaly, a French engineering firm contracted by the city of Lyon, oversees the entire operation of the Lyon Tramway. Prior to SYTRAL’s selection of Fontana’s proposal, Semaly, under the direction of chief engineer Pierre Geneste, had installed a configurable Siemens routing system that included room for sound, video and data cards, all multiplexed over a multimode, fiber-optic network. The flexibility of this system made the integration of Fontana’s work a lot smoother. All the stations were connected to the AudioBox station (Perrache) via the Siemens routing system, and soundcards were inserted at each tramway station where equipment was present. Typically, a station should include one TOA preamplifier, a 600W dual mono power amplifier and four MM-4 loudspeakers. While Semaly provided fiber-optic lines to each location, Joël Clarenne of Roiret Enterprises in Lyon handled the installation of all the equipment under the supervision of Bill Fontana.

Once installed, the system levels had to be set for each station. “The only way of controlling the AudioBox was from a computer in Perrache,” said Fontana. “So, I would have somebody go to each station in succession, measure the SPL and call me. It was very time consuming because there were 18 stations. And because I’m working with stored and live sounds, it’s not entirely predictable what we’ll get, so we have to live within a certain range.”

CONCLUSION
Bill Fontana’s installation in Lyon represents a milestone for public sound art, and perhaps for Bill Fontana’s work as well. Yet some issues still persist for Fontana after several years of working in sound art.

“There is a very simple paradox in my work, and I’m surprised this is still an issue after all these years. I began calling my work ‘sound sculptures’ 25 years ago, and I always defined it as using sound as a sculptural medium—there was no object involved. Simply, I saw it as the ability of sound to invisibly transform visual space. That was a very difficult idea for someone to grasp in 1974; and today, it’s still more inconceivable in the art world than I would have anticipated. People still expect objects with things that make sounds. They still want to see something connected to it.

“I consider the visual element to be the space that the sound is in, and the mind space that it creates. The language of sound that I am working with is from the natural world. It’s a language that makes you want to see.”

For more on Bill Fontana’s work, visit his Web site www.resoundings.org.

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Alex Artaud is a sound engineer and writer living in Oakland, California.

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