Deepl translation of https://theconversation.com/quand-bill-fontana-redonne-vie-aux-cloches-de-notre-dame-185522
On the 5th floor terrace of the Centre Pompidou, artist Bill Fontana lets us hear “live” the permanent vibrations of the bells of Notre Dame, even though they are totally inaudible to the ear. This is a magnificent and impressive sound installation produced as part of the Manifeste 2022 festival organized by IRCAM (Institut de recherche et coordination acoustique/musique). The unusual sound of the bells (muted since the fire) takes us back to Notre Dame de Paris.
In 2016, in an article entitled “Bill Fontana, the artist who sculpts the noise of the world”, I wrote as a physicist how much Bill Fontana’s work as a sound sculptor interested me: “Everything vibrates around us, but more often than not we don’t perceive this vibration of the world. Yet we can spend our lives playing with these vibrations and making them perceptible. This is what artist Bill Fontana has been doing for 45 years, for example, by recording the sound of the bells of the Basilique Saint-Denis caused only by the noise of the market in the square below.”
Technology for hearing noise
Bill Fontana has spent his life gluing accelerometers to monuments, bells, gongs, bridges… all over the world, to give voice to their mechanical vibrations induced by ambient noise.
Because everything around us moves. Although these vibrations are normally inaudible and ignored, they are present and well known to scientists and engineers. Micro-accelerometers sensitive to these vibrations emerged from micro/nanoelectronics at the end of the 20the century. They are now everywhere on Earth, including in every smartphone. So you can play Bill Fontana’s game of recording the noise of the world. To see this noise, you can use the physics teacher’s app PhyPhox which lets you manipulate all the sensors on your smartphone. The physicists behind PhyPhox draw curves and don’t transform these mechanical noises to feed our perception. That’s what Bill Fontana and IRCAM have done here, to give voice to the permanent sound of Notre Dame’s bells.
The vibrations of the world described by physics
When I discovered a few days ago that Bill Fontana had installed Silent Echoes, the name of his work in motion for many years, between the Centre Pompidou and Notre-Dame, my initial reaction was one of polite interest. After the bells of the Basilique Saint-Denis, the Millennium Bridge in London, bells in temples in Japan, etc., one could of course go on, but why? We get the point. I loved it, but I’d moved on.
My approach to Bill Fontana’s work is first and foremost that of a physicist specializing in the thermal vibrations of micro/nanostructures. That sounds a long way from the bells of Notre Dame. And yet, for all physicists, all mechanics, and indeed all those, IRCAM researchers included, for whom the phrase “study of the frequency response of a linear system subjected to broadband noise at the input” has a clear meaning, it’s ultimately the same thing.
In many situations, physicists work hard to isolate their experiments from the noises Bill Fontana makes. One of the most beautiful of these systems, protected as never before from all external mechanical vibrations wherever they may come from, is the European Virgo observatory for the detection of gravitational waves. Physicist Alain Brillet, CNRS Gold Medal winner in 2017, spends a lot of time in these lectures on the instrument at the heart of Virgo, explaining how its mirrors are one of the most isolated systems on Earth.
At first, I was fascinated by this artistic implementation of the micro-accelerometers that are now part of our everyday lives, but which are the product of an unprecedented level of technology. This was probably at the heart of my reading of his work a few years ago. The terrace of the Centre Pompidou with this new installation was to remind me that an interesting work of art is multiple, and can be completely renewed in the eyes of its viewer. A real shock.
Mea Culpa
In fact, I only had experience of Bill Fontana’s work through his videos and texts, and also through the work of students I’d supervised on “Learning by doing” projects inspired by his creations, such as “Good vibrations: The Jelly Vibration, No Tech! project”.
So I had never been present at one of his works “live”, body and mind together. As a result, despite the heatwave in June 2022, I spent two hours on the terrace of the Centre Pompidou facing Notre-Dame, listening to the permanent vibration of the bells for the first time. First of all, and even if I’m not capable of appreciating all the subtleties, I admired the sound work done on the terrace, with the loudspeakers that surround it, and even in the open air, plunge the spectators into the heart of the sound. It’s everywhere, enveloping, hypnotic, changing, but permanent. “La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée!” wrote Paul Valéry. The same is true of the vibration of Notre Dame’s bells. They’ve been vibrating for as long as they’ve existed, and will continue to vibrate for as long as they exist, in response to the sounds of Paris.
A wealth of memories
Like everyone else, I haven’t been inside Notre Dame since the fire, and my next visit may have to wait a while. On the afternoon of April 15, 2019, with researchers, teachers and students, I stood in front of the burning Notre Dame, in the Marais, on the roof of the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires de l’Université Paris Cité, stunned and frozen like everyone else, crestfallen when the spire fell. And then, three years later, I’m on this terrace of the Centre Pompidou, Notre Dame is right in front of me. Paris and its sounds are everywhere. The sound of bells emanates from the loudspeakers around me, settling me in the heart of the cathedral that has survived despite the scale of the destruction.
It’s a sound I’ve never heard before, but it’s obviously the sound of bells. It’s there. It’s always there. And it brings back those moments that make you up. At that moment, there’s nothing you can do about it. In Corto Maltese, Hugo Pratt has a Scottish soldier say:
“I’ve always felt sorry for anyone who listens to bagpipes… without being Scottish.”
You’re overwhelmed: Notre Dame, Victor Hugo, images of the Liberation of Paris, and that dreadful moment, but together on this roof in spring 2019. On March 3, 2022, thinking of the martyred Ukraine and for peace in Europe, Notre Dame’s bumblebee rang out, joining other bells all over the continent. After the fire, the clapper had to be handled by hand.
Of course, I also used my smartphone. The PhyPhox application enabled me to record the sound of the loudspeakers and calculate dozens of audio spectra. To build up my presence in this work, I needed to anchor myself by trying to identify the resonance frequencies of the different bells, i.e. their notes. Beautiful curves. Everyone approaches a work of art as they wish… or as they are! Artist Bill Fontana managed to turn me around, and I was delighted.
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