NEW YORK — San Francisco-based sound artist Bill Fontana has completed a sound sculpture entitled Panoramic Echoes in New York City’s Madison Square Park. The sonic art project uses four Meyer Sound SB-1 parabolic long-throw sound beams to project sounds into the park from distant buildings in multiple directions. The SB-1 was the key component to making Fontana’s concept work. “It’s really the only loudspeaker in the world that could do what I needed,” he says. “In a sense, it was the musical instrument for which this piece was written. It simply would not have worked had I used conventional speakers mounted inside the park. That would have ruined the magical effect.”
The SB-1 consists of a fiberglass parabolic reflector dish with a bullet-shaped pod containing a four-inch compression driver and an aspherical horn mounted at the focus of the parabolic surface and aimed at the center of the dish. A 12-inch band-limited cone driver is embedded inside the center of the dish facing the pod to steer and focus the sound produced from the horn. The SB1 110 dB peak SPL output at 100 meters.
Fontana positioned the sound beams on rooftops and balconies atop buildings located up to 400 feet away from the park — the MetLife Tower (Madison Avenue at 24th Street), the New York Life Building (Madison Avenue at 26th Street) and on two opposite corners of the International Toy Center (Fifth Avenue and Broadway) building, which also served as home for the Panoramic Echoes control room.
The SB-1 typically sees use in applications that are somewhat more conventional than Fontana's, such as in stadiums.
Four Shure SM57 microphones capture the tones from four bronze bells atop the 346-foot MetLife Tower, which are run into a small mixer before transmission via a Sennheiser UHF wireless system to a custom-programmed Harmonic Functions AudioBox digital matrix mixer for time-based processing and matrixing for the spatial effects. Two additional Sennheiser systems transmit bird songs and additional processed bell signals via the AudioBox mixer back to the SB-1 cabinets located on the far side of the park.
All sound equipment for Panoramic Echoes was installed by New York City-based Scharff Weisberg, Inc., under the supervision of project manager Tony Rossello. The Madison Square Park Conservancy, in partnership with the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, commissioned Fontana’s audio sculpture.
Steward Desmond, project manager for the Conservancy, says his organization is gratified by the salutary impact the work has had on visitors to the park. “This is a small park, and it’s surrounded by city noise, which grates on your sensibilities,” he says. “Introducing the happy sounds of birds and enhanced bells — all thanks to the SB-1 sound beam — adds magic to the park.”
“There’s something almost unimaginable about the idea,” Fontana says. “Who would put speakers like this up on the rooftops around the park? The possibility doesn’t exist in the world of most people’s imaginations.”
For more information, visit http://www.resoundings.org or http://www.meyersound.com.
