Landscape Soundings

This work of sound art is a sonic portrait of Austin and nearby areas in central Texas. Fontana recorded everything from bats in Bracken Cave near San Antonio to birds in an Austin parking lot to cypress trees growing in a Hill Country creek. "My intent was to create a calming and evocative sound landscape that will invite visitors to pause, reflect, and imagine,” Fontana says.
 

Fontana is a pioneer of this genre of art that makes sound the primary experience. However, there is also a visual element to his works: the site for which they were created, in this case the Butler Sound Gallery. Since the 1970s, Fontana has created pieces for specific sites all over the world. He calls his pieces "sound sculptures" and refers to himself as an "acoustic anthropologist." In addition to regular microphones, he uses specialized equipment such as hydrophones, which record underwater, and accelerometers, which record vibrations in inanimate objects as well as in living things such as trees. As the artist explains, "I created Landscape Soundings to have a meditative quality created from a sonic vocabulary inspired by the environmental acoustic history and connections to the living soundscapes of Austin, as well as important ecological zones in the surrounding environments and of Texas at large. My method for recording environmental sounds is scientific, poetic, and musical." 
 

Fontana was born and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where regular visits to the Cleveland Museum of Art and performances by the Cleveland Orchestra influenced him. In college, he studied music composition, and in the late 1960s he learned about the work of two seminal cultural figures, composer John Cage and conceptual art pioneer Marcel Duchamp. Cage and Duchamp both incorporated things already in the world into their art, focusing on orchestrating people's perceptions of extant, "found" objects and sounds. Fontana built on their revolutionary approach with his own groundbreaking work.