We went to Audium this weekend and had our day dreams blown open.

Audium is an immersive aural experience perpetrated by composer, conductor, Stan Shaff. Since the late 60s, Mr. Shaff has been performing intricate musical movements to his audience in pitch darkness within a theater designed specifically for the compositions.

The theater that we went to is actually his second, which he built after receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. It currently boasts 176 speakers, meticulously arranged for optimal listening.

The theater is lovely. It has the comforting carpeted silence of a planetarium, and the clean modern design of something out of 2001, A Space Odyssey. But once you settle into a comfy chair and the lights fade completely out, you are only left with the vivid images that the music evokes within you.

The music is spectacular. Our friend Soph put it best when he said that Audium is to sound what fireworks are to light. I would be hard pressed to beat his description.

The music is a soundscape of samples, some short and some long, most melodic, and all seamlessly woven into a distinct movement. Of all the music I have heard, I believe the closest thing to Shaff’s compositions would be Nurse With Wound. But unlike Nurse With Wound, Audium is not psychologically damaging ;)  It certainly has moments that will wake you, and a few that may dial in some strong emotion, but the general feel of his work is soothing, resonant versus dissonant, and entirely engaging of the imagination.

To sit in the darkness of Audium and listen to the music pour through you is to feel a thousand worldly meanings offered up as a discerningly curated gallery of the mind. At Audium, one’s ears become a portal to memories and imaginings, and the canvas is not the air beyond the ears, but the space between them.

I look forward to seeing the show again, and perhaps talking with Mr. Shaff about his project.