Silent Echoes : Notre Dame
by Bill Fontana
©Bill Fontana
After Notre Dame’s devastating fire in 2019, renowned sound artist Bill Fontana realized that the cathedral bells, which survived the blaze and have remained in the building’s two bell towers, weren’t completely silent. They were picking up the ambient sound of the city life and reconstruction work around them and silently resonating.
Bill Fontana conceived a sound sculpture, called Silent Echoes : Notre-Dame, in which seismic accelerometers were installed on the ten bells of Notre Dame Cathedral allowing the acoustic image of the cathedral and the imprint of a city to be revealed and projected elsewhere. These sounds were transmitted live and played at the Pompidou Centre for a sound art installation on the 5th floor terrace of the Centre.
Bill and Sébastien had the opportunity to climb the bell towers to install HBK accelerometers on the bells to listen to what’s going on inside it. “I realised I was hearing a sound that probably nobody’s ever heard before that this bell is making and has been making continuously since 1681. It’s the voice, soul, the breath of the bell.”
The bells capture the ambient sound energy of the city, resonating imperceptibly with this bustle, echoing the distinctive sounds of Parisian life and the restoration work carried out by artisans inside the cathedral. To do this, and after having obtained the necessary authorizations from l’Etablissement Public chargé de la Conservation et de la Restauration de la Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris (EPRNDP) (i.e. the French Public Organisation responsible for the conservation and restoration of Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral), Bill Fontana contacted Sébastien to become his project manager in order to help him realize his artistic vision and give a new life to the silent echoes of these bells.
To capture the resonant sounds of the bells, we needed to attach seismic accelerometers to each of the cathedral bells. Likening the accelerometers to “a stethoscope that a doctor uses to listen to a heartbeat,” these accelerators pick up the silent echoes to create a live ten-channel sound sculpture.
Once done, the team were able to listen to the sounds they were making. Bill Fontana says, “it was a really magical moment to hear these sounds for the first time! It just goes to prove that, after the fire, the Cathedral and its bells weren’t dead; merely sleeping.”
Sébastien and his colleague Simon Périgot dealt with all the logistical and technical elements in installing the accelerometers, including working in partnership with the EPRNDP, IRCAM the French “Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique” (Institute for Musical and Acoustic Research and Coordination) for the sound sculpture transmission and installation at the Pompidou Centre, le Groupe de Travail du Chantier CNRS/MC Notre-Dame (Acoustic Task Force), HBK, the company which provided the accelerometers and with French telecommunications giant Orange to transmit the sounds of the bells using fiber optic cables live to the Center Pompidou. This work was also coordinated with Southern and Partners and National Geographic photographer Tomas van Houtryve to visually document the installation work.
The Silent Echoes: Notre-Dame sound sculpture has been commissioned by IRCAM/Centre Georges Pompidou and was premiered on the 5th floor terrace at the Centre Pompidou, facing the two bell towers of Notre Dame, in June- July 2022. It came back to the Centre in October-November 2022.
https://manifeste.ircam.fr/agenda/silent-echoes-notre-dame-2022/detail/
Podcast Radio France - Interview of Bill Fontana and Sébastien Jouan: Festival ManiFeste : Bill Fontana redonne vie aux cloches de Notre-Dame (radiofrance.fr)
And a beautiful short documentary on Arte
