Seeing with your ears
Stan Shaff is a music composer who became drawn to the unexplored properties of sound, and in particular the way sound is affected by the space you hear it in. In the late 1950s, he collaborated with another professional musician, Doug McEachern, who was also an equipment engineer. The two began experimenting with recording technology, speaker systems, and architectural features to create a revolutionary setting where you could “experience” sound, not just listen to it.
From a composer’s perspective, this new space, the Audium, is another tool for the making of “sound sculptures.” But Shaff’s intention, as it has evolved over the years, is in part to lead his audience to an understanding of the contradiction between the fast-moving world outside the Audium and the experience to be had inside. In this sense, sound can be a metaphysical encounter.
Info
Address 1616 Bush Street, San Francisco, CA, 94109, www.audium.org, +1 415.771.1616 | Public Transport Bus: 38 (Starr King Way St & Gough St stop) | Hours Fri & Sat performances at 8:30 pm| Tip Stroll down the hidden brick pathway of the Historic Cottage Row bounded by Bush, Sutter, and Webster Streets, lined with quaint Victorians built during the late 1860s and 1870s. On the Sutter side is a pleasant mini park with benches.
At the Audium’s theater on Bush Street, performances are every Friday and Saturday night at 8:30pm. Shaff, himself, often takes tickets and leads people to their seats—there are only 49, set in concentric circles. When the first public performances began in 1960, there were 8 speakers; now there are 176, including ones installed under each seat. The compositions weave together sounds that are both familiar and strange—from music, nature, and the everyday—as you sit in absolute darkness.
Shaff has been quoted to say, “I have always been possessed by the evocative qualities all sounds seem to have, whether natural or electronic. Sounds touch deeper levels of our inner life, layers that lie just beneath the visual world.… Audiences should feel sound as it bumps up against them, caresses, travels through, covers and enfolds them. I ask listeners to see with their ears and feel with their bodies sounds as images, dreams and memories. As people walk into a work, they become part of its realization.”
Back
To the online map