03 Bill Fontana – Soundscapes
Imagine turning on a public radio station today and not hearing music or talking, but a sound. You don’t know what the sound is, but for several minutes it just plays and you listen to it. There’s no narration. No explanation. No chipper, relatable host breaking in to tell you some fact or make some point. The only time you hear narration is at the end of the piece when you’re told in a single, simply-delivered sentence what it was you were just listening to.
In 1982, that happened every single day on KQED and other public radio stations around the country. These stations were running a series called “Soundscapes” produced by sound artist Bill Fontana. As he traveled around the world to put on sound exhibits at museums and galleries, he made recordings that became part of the series. Each episode was 4 minutes long and he made 365 in total, one for each day of the year.
What I appreciate most about these soundscapes is that meaning is not imposed on the listener. Not only is there no narration, but there are no cuts in the scene. You’re listening to an uninterrupted, unmanipulated moment in time captured through sound.
Some of the recordings of seemingly mundane scenes are my favorite. You can listen to them again and again, and new details continue to emerge. Because there is no direction, your imagination is free to come up with its own narratives.
Take the recording of the piazza in Italy. There’s a clattering sound in the beginning. It’s unclear what it is, but perhaps because my father is a carpenter and I worked with him in the summer, I imagine men lengthening a metal ladder. Then there are the footsteps of someone crossing the square. It sounds to me like a woman in heels. Who is she? Where is she going? There is a hushed voice in the left channel of the mix. It sounds like an old man. Is he talking to another old man? I think he says “certo.” I picture him in a wool cap and with a big nose.
If the sounds in the piazza were identified and described, this imaginative experience would be circumscribed. My head would be filled with the images of the narrator, and there would be no room for my own.
I also really like listening to the pieces with repetitive droning sounds, like the buzzing light pole on a country road. I hate buzzing lights. But I’ve listened over and over again to Bill’s piece about the light. There’s something appealing about listening to the changes in this monotonous drone. Again, it makes me wonder. Why does the sound change? Does it have something to do with the electrical current? There’s probably some explanation, but like so many things you encounter in life, that explanation isn’t apparent and you’ll never find out. You just get to sit in the experience and wonder.
The piece on the train that we put at the end of the selection is similar to the light pole in that it is a droning, repetitive sound, but unlike the light pole there is an understandable action that corresponds to the sound. The train is moving. You can hear the change in speed. You can hear the whistle. The sound is filled with narrative potential. The train is going somewhere. It’s up to the listener to picture where.
Chris and I met Bill and first heard these sounds during the beginning of the pandemic. We were putting together a retrospective of his work for our listening series. Even though we had worked in public radio for over a decade, we had never heard of his soundscape project, and neither had most of the other people we knew in radio, even at KQED, where I worked and the show was originally produced. Only a few old-timers remembered Bill Fontana at all.
Today, it would be next to impossible to convince a major public radio station like KQED to play something like these soundscapes. Chris and I learned that first hand. Even though I worked at KQED, the station refused to find time for The World According to Sound, which in many ways is far more modest than Bill’s soundscapes. Instead of 4 minutes, the pieces are only 90 seconds long. We narrated and cut the sound to direct listeners toward certain understandings. There was far less of the open-ended, meditative space in Bill’s pieces. And even that was too much.
Not only were stations back then open to more adventurous, curious material, but there was funding for experimentation and production. Bill got a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. When we started WATS, we had a phone call with the CPB, who basically said it’s impossible now to get money for new programs.
Bill asked us if we thought that KQED or other stations would be interested in rerunning some segments of his show. Not a chance, we thought. There’s a lot of great programming in public radio archives. But just like there’s little appetite for new experimental programs, there’s been a major collective loss of knowledge of what used to be on the air.
More Of Bill’s Work