By Johnny Ray Huston

THE LIGHTS GO down and the music begins. Ennio Morricone's lush melodies and blaring, cacophonous contrasts. Bernard Herrmann's hypnotic horns and knife-slice strings. Michel Legrand's buoyant jazz-inflected pop and Georges Delerue's mythic, tragic lyricism. Nino Rota's floating keyboard spirits, Komeda's chic decadence, and Goblin's frenzied sacrificial drums. Renowned film composers work their magic in the dark, and in a sense, their scores illuminate the darkness – or magnify it.

Stan Shaff's only-in-San-Francisco creation Audium might be described as the greatest soundtrack or score for the film in your mind. An Audium performance moves beyond the darkness of the movie house into deeper primordial terrain, fading to pitch black and then unleashing an array of sounds so kinetic and colorful that projected images aren't necessary. For almost 30 years, Shaff and equipment designer Doug McEachern have streamlined their invention, a building – an easy-to-miss structure with a sauna-like wood-paneled exterior on Bush Street – that is a musical instrument.

Audium is best experienced if you follow Shaff's instructions and show up about a half-hour before the scheduled 8:30 p.m. performance. Purchase a yellow ticket from the booth inside the front door, and soak up sounds amid the lobby's display of sculptures. Up a staircase, a carved wooden box seems to contain a busy kindergarten classroom. In the foyer, ticking timepieces and tolling bells are matched by an uncanny projection: the hands of a clock, visible on the floor. When the half-hour strikes, Shaff parts the black curtain of a hexagonal proscenium and welcomes you to his whirligigging new world of sound. If Joe Meek were alive to experience it, he'd die and go to heaven.

Bay Guardian: Considering the performance takes place in an almost pitch-black setting, I was surprised by the visual quality of Audium's sound. Whether my eyes were closed or open, I saw things.

Stan Shaff: I'm always intrigued when people tell me about visions. It's been a learning experience, the ways in which people have responded to Audium over the years. I'm a composer, and I'm interested in the placement of sound. What does it do when you move it, give it energies and speeds? Audium has uncovered things I hadn't previously encountered in my own compositions. I'm still discovering the ramifications.

BG: Did any sites inspire Audium? Also, I'm wondering if composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen were influences.

SS: I can quite honestly say Audium grew out of my own personal trip, so to speak, as a composer. I was a trumpet player and played other brass instruments. The idea of an antiphonal choir intrigued me. The San Francisco Symphony had a performance of Berlioz's Requiem, and I was in one of the brass ensembles. That probably left an imprint because it was highly spatial.

The interest in space's relation to sound is rather ancient. There were antiphonal choirs during medieval times. But asking what sound does, musically or emotionally – to grab ahold of sound and say, "I want it above your head, below you, speeding around you" – has become a driving energy for me. I like to call it choreographing sound.

BG: You've worked with choreographers, in fact. Didn't you work with Anna Halprin?

SS: Yes, years ago I was one of many musicians who improvised with her dance group; I remember one performance surrounded her dancers with speakers. Dance was a natural springboard for my work because it's spatial.

BG: The night I attended Audium you mentioned that people from Dolby Labs had recently paid a visit.

SS: Yes, their research and development staff came. They thought, "We set an audience in a realistic environment, and here you have the gall to throw the sound around." For most movies, Audium's approach would be distracting. Perhaps Audium is a new art form in which the entire environment is a tool for composition. The [sound-generating] board I use is a compositional tool; it enables the composer to recognize all kinds of relationships of space when he performs and utilizes it. The board that we're currently using is about the eighth one that Doug and I have developed. Each time we develop a board it encompasses past ones.

BG: Is that what the title of your current performance, Audium8, comes from, or is it your eighth composition?

SS: Both. Our technology has grown, but we're just an embryo. We've kicked a door open that people are going to pile through in time.

BG: I wanted to ask about Audium's 49 seats and 169 speakers. Is there an underlying meaning or reason behind those numbers?

SS: The size of this environment restricted us to a certain number of seats in order to meet building codes. The number of speakers has grown from wanting to do things that couldn't be done with a minimal amount, and also from wanting the characteristic of sound moving through space. We've divided the space into a geometry of sound, and the speakers fit that geometry.

BG: So Audium's shapes – the concentric-circle seating arrangement and the domelike quality of the main room – are derived from geometry?

SS: They're a combination of many things. One problem with working in a relatively small space is that energizing low-frequency sounds is very difficult. If you slant the walls, the lower frequencies are enhanced instead of canceled. That's one design implication, but others are purely aesthetic. The room looks like a dome, but actually it has a solid geometry.

BG: How have the pieces you perform changed over time?

SS: Each composition has been parallel to our technical learning. The two interplay. It's a good example of science's relation to art; the technology drives some of my compositional elements, and in turn, some of my ideas about composition drive the technology. Every time we do something different in this space, every time Doug or I come up with a new thought, I have to go back to the drawing board as a composer. I have a new work coming up which incorporates little things in the space that I haven't played for audiences yet.

BG: There's a marching band passage in Audium8 that suits what you were talking about earlier regarding Berlioz and brass – it has a great deal of movement. How did you go about recording it?

SS: I tend to record in stereo. When the recording comes into Audium, I can split it up in fantastic ways and move it to create illusions you can't get in ordinary recordings. A band can march from left to right or right to left, or stay up high or go down low.

Even though I'm a formally trained composer of the old school, my work doesn't sound like that; it doesn't contain traditional ideas about theme, development, and melodic lines. This space inspires surreal thinking; I tend to utilize sound for its own sake.

BG: Have any particular composers or producers been interesting to you in terms of the spatial relationships of sounds?

SS: Certainly Charles Ives. But the composer who comes to mind the most – and I didn't even know about him when I started Audium – is Edgar Varèse. He was a primary thinker in terms of projecting sound. One of the first examples would be his Poème électronique [1958], which was performed in a pavilion at a world exposition in Belgium. He would be the father of an idea like Audium, but the notion of a space that itself is an instrument is ours.

As the years go on, similar interests merge. It's in the ethers; people pick up the nature of our age, which is space. This is what we're in – the space age.

BG: What responses have you had from musicians who've visited Audium?

SS: I've been visited by many electronic musicians, particularly from Europe, and younger pop musicians who've grown tired of using just three chords.

This year we did a program off-site for the Other Minds Festival, and I appeared on a panel. One composer, Francis Dhomont, had similar interests, only he doesn't have a space like Audium in which to explore his ideas. But most of the composers who've come here wouldn't be technically inclined to build a space like this. I don't think I would – it was just happenstance that Doug and I merged our ideas about music and electronics.

As a composer, if I was standing outside of Audium looking in, I'd probably say, "Alright, Shaff, what do you do with this?" I'm sitting here with this marvelous tool. But if I didn't have Audium to play with, my ideas would be more theory than actuality.

One of the reasons I suspect Audium has survived is that it's open to a general audience and not just an art audience. Anyone can arrive from off the street and be surprised. If they're expecting a whistled tune or foot-tapping melody, they're in for a shock. Little old ladies from Iowa – and some have visited here – don't have a place in their neighborhoods that showcases how sounds fly around. Some people find Audium evocative of a new musical direction. Others concentrate on immersing themselves in a sound world. One aspect of darkness, even outside of Audium, is that you're forced to go inside yourself: there's no escape. Some people find that relatively uncomfortable. We're so visual as a culture.

BG: Has darkness always been an element of Audium?

SS: Always. Ever since we started it's been as much of an ingredient as sound movement. Primarily because sight tends to cancel out some of the characteristics of sound; there's a conflict there, or a diversion of attention. In Audium you focus completely on sound. The darkness is very much a part of the work's presentation of sound that emerges from nowhere, goes back out, and then comes back in at another place. Darkness allows the sound to unfold.

BG: If someone tried to record Audium, they wouldn't even begin to be able to capture the spatial relationships of the sounds.

SS: You couldn't. However I think in the future you will be able to. There will be things coming down the pike. Even in more conventional two-speaker setups, there will be greater movement and placement of sound.

BG: Recordings for radio are defined by compression; they're geared toward cramming as much sound as possible into a small space. Audium is almost the opposite.

SS: Yes, the silence [here] can be deafening. I often think – and this might sound presumptuous – of how a Rembrandt painting comes out of blackness. His work always started from the inside outward, and that's what you have at Audium, with sound emerging from nothing.

BG: When you attend concerts elsewhere, do you often find yourself thinking, "I wish they'd designed this hall differently"?

SS: [laughs] I do, but only in the sense that I think it would interesting if the sounds could be projected and framed the way they are in Audium. Frank Gehry just designed a hall [the Walt Disney Concert Hall] for the L.A. Philharmonic that I'm dying to see. If he came to Audium, he might impart some elements into his work because he's organic in the way he thinks.

My conception of Audium covers from when people enter the front door to the time they're absolutely back outside. Everything in this environment – the lighting, the artwork – I want to be part of the aesthetic I'm presenting. The whole environment is interrelated; the sounds you hear at the beginning [in the hallway] have a relationship to the performance. Another composer might have a different view, but I see the entire theater as being part of the work – it's influencing me, and in turn I try to influence it.