“When I was a very young boy, living in a small Italian village,” said Bertoia, “I sensed one day that a celebration was about to take place. There was a great feeling of excitement in the air…. All the cathedral bells in all the little village were ringing…. I think my work with sound may be an attempt to recapture the magic of that moment but, of course, it’s much more than that.”

In 1959 Bertoia was making a sculpture out of several rods. As he attemped to bend a rod, it broke and struck another, making a sound. “The sound echoed in my mind for a very long time,” said Bertoia. “It initiated a deliberate gesture in search of understanding what a group of wires would do.” This marked the beginning of a decade and a half in which Bertoia worked extensively with sounding sculptures, calling them and the aural environment they created “sonambients.”