San Francisco’s Pacific Heights is home to a theater of sound called Audium. Listeners sit in darkness, surrounded by 169 speakers, and their ears are made to see. The show is of sound only. Noises spiral in all directions. Tones bounce multi-dimensionally. Sound is sculpted they say. Audium is a one of a kind room built in and operated since 1975 specifically for listening. With a National Endowment for the Arts, Audium was given life. It’s a building inside a building with a floating floor and a suspended ceiling. Speakers are spread throughout - dangling, buried underneath, and embedded in the walls. The show features found sound meets conducted instruments meets Philip Glass. Recorded offerings are mixed live. The “tape operator” (conductor) fades and melds the sonic movement from a one of a kind soundboard. Blank space takes on the images of hearing. 

Eighty year-old Audium creator Stan Shaff greets listeners at the door himself. He’s kindly, soft spoken, and austere as he leads those waiting to a foyer, then through a tunnel, and into the main performance space. Seats are taken, lights go out, Shaff disappears to his conducting booth, and the program begins. An hour-long live performance, called simply Audium 9: 

Waves hitting a shore rise in stereo from the center. A gruff seagull’s cry splits diagonally four ways and travels outward toward the corners of the room. There, the quadra-gulls become a little girl’s voice talking about her name and the colors pink and orange. Inverted trumpet notes sprout from smaller speakers and shoot back and forth from wall to wall and ceiling to floor.

Raindrops begin to land in pockets. It all morphs and meshes. Violins undulate diagonally. Then the sound of a plane taking off is birthed from subwoofers below the floor. It washes the other sounds out from bottom to top and wipes away. Then a heavy wooden door slams sixteen times in a spiral back to center, and a guitar strums the note E minor 7. There is echo and buzz. Footsteps in boots march the periphery of the room. The buzz on the guitar is jittery and your mind pictures a flickering neon vacancy sign on top of a run down hotel. Sanguine clothesline underwear there wafts in the breeze. In the seventh floor room below, a small girl with orange from Cheetos smeared across her face is learning how to write her name for the first time. Violins fold out again left to right like origami herons over white noise drone. It is starting to rain. A hush - the sound. A million soft snares. A million soft snare drums rolling, playing the theory of thunder to the smell of wet streets below. Rolling the ions. Embroidery of the storm.

Stan Shaff spoke:

What made you actually bring Audium into existence?

Shaff: Insanity and a need to see sound? I’ve always been motivated by music and sounds. And by memories and the imagery they evoke. Audium is a combination of those two things for me. Some people paint. I do this. I like the suggestive qualities some sounds seem to have, be them natural or electronic. I think sounds touch certain levels of our inner lives, layers that exist beneath the visual world. I’m interested in sound as object, sound as environment, and sound as an event. 

So you’re way into Judas Priest then?

No. Not very much.

You know Judas Priest right? “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”? That song?

I recall that song yes. But I myself am not a Judas Priest fan.

What do you want your listeners to take away from an Audium show?

I’d say whatever memory of image their mind brings up. Or a sensation. Or maybe they go home and dream.

Can you talk about your soundboard?

It’s a series of faders and knobs basically. I control direction, speed, and intensity on multiple planes. It changes from show to show. I am interactive with the crowd even though I can’t see them. I feel the energy in the room. Sometimes people breathe heavy or fidget a lot in their chair, I pick up on all that. 

I looked at your booth during the performance and couldn’t see any light at all. I thought for sure I’d see some light in there.

No, I don’t need light anymore. I know the board pretty well after using it for thirty years. It’s all by feel. The performance is much more vivid in the dark. I can take everyone in the room and put them inside the same mind. The speakers see out.

Are you an analog only man?

Everything I do with Audium is analog. But really, I don’t hear a difference anymore. I’m interested in sound period, whether it's made electronically or if it’s played by acoustic means, it’s all just the same to me. What really matters is how it shapes. Hit your hand against a poll, does it sound good? Then I’ll use it. When I began thinking conceptually of Audium in the late 1950's, obviously technology was more limited. Believe me, I’d love to have been able to play with a Pro Tools or Ableton program back then. I'm a trumpet player by trade. So is my son. The trumpet sounds you hear in Audium 9 are him. I'll probably hand this off to him when I retire. I'm not going to do it forever.

Can I be your groupie?

I don’t know, can you? I’m not sure I’ve ever had one of those.