Bill Fontana's River Sounding

You often refer to your work as sound sculpture. What does that mean?

'The idea for using that word came when I was a student in New York in the late 1960s and was inspired by a statement Marcel Duchamp made in the notes to his “Large Glass” in which he says, “Musical sculpture. Sounds lasting and leaving from different places and forming a sounding sculpture that lasts.” I don't consider my work reducible to individual recordings. For me, it's the immersion and the experience of the relationship of sound to an architectural space and the interaction that people have with the sound in that space.'

Where did the impetus for 'River Sounding' come from?

'I'd been a frequent visitor to London because of projects at Big Ben, Tate Modern and the Millennium Bridge, so I've spent a lot of time on the Thames. Somerset House gave me the opportunity to make a piece about the river, but also to consider the strange history of that building and its relationship to the water. Originally there was a sixteenth-century palace on that site and then, in the eighteenth century, Admiral Nelson would view the design of ships from his offices there, because the building opened straight on to the river in those days.'

How did you pick your locations from 100 miles of river?

'Well, I guess the sound locations that I was interested in are not the obvious ones, but those that are hidden or that nobody hears, like the bell at the very end of Southend pier. And while this isn't a tourist's view of the Thames, I did put vibration sensors on the hull of HMS Belfast to listen to how the ship reacted to the river going by. I made lots of underwater recordings with hydrophones, where the currents are strong or weak, or where you can hear ships' engines underwater.

Another of the great adventures I had during the project was through an organisation called Trinity House, which was founded in 1514 by Henry VIII to be responsible for navigational safety and all the lighthouses on the British coast. They took me out into the North Sea so I could get up close to these floating sound devices called bell buoys and whistle buoys, one of which will be the acoustic superstar of this piece, making this resonant hooting noise like when you blow into an empty wine bottle, but on a grander scale.'

Will all your recordings be mixed together?

'I'm installing a multidirectional sound system in the lightwells, which are the open-air tunnels that run all the way around the courtyard of Somerset House - most Londoners have never been down there. The architecture of the lightwells is quite beautiful - you could be on a narrow street in Venice with all the buttresses and arches -and on 24 of them are going to be loudspeakers pointing up and down, playing streams of sound that build up ambient layers of texture and movement.

And then I'm going to do something here that is really different for me by projecting small videos from some of the locations where I recorded, although at Haunch of Venison last year I showed life-size projections of some famous Buddhist temple bells in Kyoto with the sounds that they make when they're not ringing. I attached sensors to the static bells to record how they'd react to the ambient sounds in the garden and they were actually alive with sound.

Finally, in the underground passage that transects the underside of the courtyard at Somerset House - it's called the “Dead House” because of the graves and tombstones that date back to the seventeenth-century court - there'll be a particularly low-frequency sound that makes the whole space resonate and vibrate. It will be an acoustic surprise.'