Notre Dame 22 and spatialization
Notre Dame 22
From Wednesday, the 8th of June to the 2nd of July, 2022
Centre Pompidou, South terrace of the Museum, 5th Floor
Luca Bagnoli, sound engineer at IRCAM tells us about the Notre Dame 22 installation on which he collaborates.
" Notre-Dame has been described as the soul of Paris. Following the tragic fire of 2019, the bells became silent. The sound structure imagined by Bill Fontana will make audible the fact that these bells ring secretly all the time. He thinks of this secret resonance as the heartbeat of Notre-Dame.
Those sounds that the bells make, captured with the help of several seismic measurement microphones, are created by their harmonic response to the ambient sounds and internal physical vibrations of Paris that surround Notre-Dame. The sounds that will be revealed will also make it possible to collect sounds emanating from the Notre Dame construction site.
The physical fact that these bells are harmonically excited by the ambient sounds of Paris and the vibrational energy that the cathedral collects is a phenomenon that Bill Fontana wishes to make public in a work of sound art which, will not only be beautiful to the ear, but which will have healing relevance in the suspended sense of time created by the coronavirus pandemic and the tragic Notre Dame fire.
This sound rendering is rebroadcast in real time by spatializing the signals of the ten bells on thirty loudspeakers in the south terrace on the 5th floor of the Center Pompidou. "
