While in Oslo last week for the seminar on sound art I also got the opportunity to meet a number of people I haven’t seen in a while as well as making new friends. Dragon of Bull|Miletic has sent me some very intersting links. One of them is for Audium in San Fransisco "the only theatre of its kind in the world pioneering the exploration of space in music. The theatre’s 169 speakers bathe listeners in sounds that move past over and under them. “Sound sculptures” are performed in darkness in the 49-seat theatre."
The history of Audium goes all the way back to the 1950’s initiated by composer Stan Shaff and equipment designer Doug McEachern.
“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. All sounds are communicative – sound as birth life and death sound as time and space sound as object environment or event. 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. From entrance to exit AUDIUM is a sound-space continuum."
Stan Shaff Composer
