You can leave your specs at home for this show. It’s all about your ears. While many synesthetic listeners perceive music as having colors, any careful listener might well perceive three-dimensional shapes in an Audium program.
Audium is the brainchild of musician, composer, and teacher Stanley Shaff and musician and electronics expert Doug McEachern. They claim it is the only theater of its kind in the world, and they have been pioneering the exploration of space in music there for over 40 years. The theater’s 176 speakers bathe listeners in sounds that move around in all dimensions. Their “sound sculptures” are performed in darkness in an intimate 49-seat theater.
Shaff describe’s the importance of sound on the Audium website: “We are conceived in sound, we grow and emerge in its wake. Our history is a collection of sound sensations, experiences, emotions all uniting into an aural identity. It is this ocean of recollections, sound images, dreams, memories we share.
The theater is premiering a new work composed by father-and-son team Stanley and David Shaff titled Audium 10 on June 15. According to the younger Shaff:
Audium 10 is a new work “sculpted” for Audium’s 176-speaker room. Listeners are immersed in natural and urban sounds from across the globe, as well as a vast assortment of electronic sounds. Water, trains, gongs, birds, and many others [sources] move past, under, and above the audience in total darkness. The ideas explored in this work come from the life experiences of the father and son creators, and include ideas of travel, movement both natural and man-made, and the fluid nature of life.
Shows are every Thursday [through the summer], Friday, and Saturday. Doors are at 8 p.m. and the show begins promptly at 8:30 p.m. Admission is $20. Children 12 years and above are welcome.