Stan Shaff: San Francisco’s Immersive Sound at Audium

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Stan Shaff’s fascination with the use of sound movement as a compositional tool grew out of his roots as a jazz trumpet player. In 1960, he began staging the first of his live “sound sculptures” throughout the Bay Area. By 1965 he had created Audium, the first – and still only permanent – theater for sound movement, in San Francisco. Audium has grown to include an installation of 176 speakers. Today, Stan’s work is being continued on in partnership with his son, Dave, who is also a trumpet player. In Stan’s own words, “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.” It should be noted that Stan’s work pre-dated, by almost 20 years, the debut of Dolby’s revolutionary “split surround” stereo for cinema in 1978 (tested during the release of Superman, then formally introduced the following year with Apocalypse Now ). Audium continues to stage performances every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, year ‘round, to sellout audiences.

Do you feel that you were the first to use surround sound?

It’s hard to assert that. We might have been. We were certainly among the first to develop the immersive sound idea, and to utilize and control the motion of sound in real time.

Where did the inspiration come from to move sound around space?

As a musician myself, I learned my craft playing the trumpet. The first time music and space occurred to me was in my high school years. It was after WWII and my school was mourning those who had died in service of the country. We had a memorial in the auditorium, and I was asked to play “Taps.” It was me and a couple of other trumpet players, and we decided to play from different places in the auditorium. One was in the balcony, another was on the stage, and another was in the closet. Guess who was in the closet? [ laughter ] I didn’t realize it at the time, but that is how I first became interested in sound and distance. Decades later, after having played professionally as a jazz and symphonic guy, I became acquainted with [sculptor] Seymour Lock. I was teaching his son, and he knew I was interested in experimenting with sound. I met Seymour, who was teaching at SF State, and he was working with an overhead projector. He was probably one of the first to develop a “lightshow.” He asked me to come over once a week; he would project abstract images on a screen and I would interact and interpret them with my trumpet. So, I started thinking about how the visual organizes sound. He was using light as sculpture, and focusing on how light played a part in all art. He thought of it as a force that had a language all of its own. Certainly, sound itself might have language, in terms of what it feels like. And the movement of sound might have another characteristic of its own. I began working with a modern dancer – Anna Halprin. We would play as the dancers improvised; they were very free form. That’s when I became interested in composition – by doing it on the fly. I started to move around the stage and interacting with the dancers, and that became the stimulus for Audium. As I moved closer to the other musicians or dancers, it was like another communication was occurring. Doug McEachern became a close friend. He was a musician, but also had an electronics bug. I proposed to him being able to mic and move my trumpet around and circulate it through different speakers. He put together a small board so we could move sound around through speakers. I saw the movement of sound itself as composition. So, we started taping sound and that extended the possibilities more from just playing live. The more we did it, the larger the board got and the more complicated it became. We also began to work with different intensities of sound. This was back in the early 1960s, when there was so much experimentation in all of the arts, especially in northern California. I had taught in middle school, high schools, and colleges. I always had an auditorium available that I could experiment with. I would involve the students and have them improvise. So, we put on a program at the Museum of Modern Art that was probably one of the first lightshows ever, anywhere.

The first board was built when?

In 1960. The board became a musical instrument. Anna’s husband, Lawrence Halprin, was a well-known landscape artist, so we set up speakers outdoors at their house in Marin and the dancers moved around them. We created a Doppler effect; by putting two crosswires over the audience’s head we could turn a speaker around manually without the mechanics making any noise. Darkness was absolutely necessary; it was an ingredient in the language. The more that an audience was put in the position of using their ears, the larger the vocabulary became. Darkness is almost as important as the sound itself. The first time we turned the light down at a performance, a child screamed. We had to let him and his mother leave and then start over. The goal was to create the perception of sound above, behind you, and eventually below you. In the darkness, the ear becomes dominant. We eventually decided we should create a permanent space. We rented an old lodge hall in 1965. From the time people enter to when they leave, our work is going on. They are entering a different sound world. That became the aesthetic. The original hall was upstairs. Sound would follow people on the way in, up until they left.

How do you feel about music when heard out of context?

I realized, in retrospect, that I went to a circus as a child where the clowns would randomly appear in the audience. They’d pop out in the balcony. That ultimately had impact on my expanding and using space. Every element becomes part of the entire experience. We are trying to demonstrate that all spaces are flexible. The board has always been four channels. We had two stereo machines that we synced. It was with switches and dials; no faders.

Are there meters?

No, we do it all by ear since we are doing it all in the dark and by feel. I think moving sound opens up a whole universe of possibilities for composers. Sound, when you move it from one point to another, is altered in all kinds of ways, regardless of the speakers. There is an enhancement, as well as a diminishment when you give sound energy as it moves. Since I played a brass instrument, you inevitably move since you play in marching bands. And when a brass and percussive band comes towards you, you experience all of the different harmonics as they approach. When you put the audience in the middle of the noise waves, the characteristics of the listening experience becomes quite different.

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Your goal with the room is to have not deadened or colored, acoustically?

We learned everything by doing, through experimentation. We were not acousticians. We were aware that deep waves would create standing waves if you had solid straight walls; that they would cancel each other out and the entire low register could disappear. We decided on slanted walls, so the sound literally circulates throughout the environment. We tried different sound absorbers. We found that the best sound absorber is air. We are on one of the busiest streets in San Francisco – Bush Street – a major thoroughfare with trucks and sirens. There are five air spaces between our main room and the street, and almost all of that external noise disappears. The ceiling is lowered and the floor is raised – it is like a small building within a building.

Dave Shaff: The ceiling is flat but has acoustic tiles hanging down, almost like a dome, in concentric circles.

How do you deal with signal loss with so much wire and so many speakers?

What was important to us was hiding everything – all the wires and most of the speakers.

Are your source sounds pure? Or since they are going to be colored by the room and movement, is the source as big a priority as normal?

We were limited by what we could afford. So, we did our best to have a rich array and as much diversity between speakers. Even cheap speakers add to the vocabulary. Engineers are often trying to make things one-to-one, but everything is colored! Every element – the preamp, etc. – adds something. Every speaker is an instrument. They have a personality. With trumpet, I would practice against a carpeted wall to perfect my sound. But then I’d go off and play in a nightclub or outdoors and everything would change and be completely out of my hands, sonically.

Yes, people often rehearse in a space that doesn’t at all resemble what the real world will be. Even a soundcheck in an empty room will never reflect – pun intended – a room full of folks absorbing sound.

Exactly.

Do you see noise as something to be eliminated and caged or utilized?

Much of my work might be called noise. [ laughter ] If people get out of hand at a performance – which has happened – at human level it can be more disturbing than a bus or street noise, which tends to be easier to tune out. Once there was a bus outside that would always beep, so the only way that I could control it was to record it and play with it at the same time and incorporate it deliberately.

DS: There is the noise from the analog switches themselves as we perform. One person said it was like the foot clicks from a ballerina onstage.

How many speakers total do you utilize?

There are 176 in the building and more than a hundred of them are in the performance room. We have subwoofers on the ground. We have tweeters hanging from the ceiling and a lot of 12-, 16-, and 18-inch horns around.

What do you think people are losing with wearing earbuds as they become so isolated from their immediate environment? They might be walking and moving, but the sound itself is stable.

The sense of being in a space. They don’t feel the sound. They aren’t immersed with their bones. It is not as visceral. You’re losing the physicality.

They are no longer listening with the entire body.

DS: Today, Audium forces people to go within themselves as they are cut off from their phones for an hour or so. For many people now, that is a rarity.

What also affects the coloration of sound, other than movement?

The ear itself should be expanded by experiencing a focused sound world. A very elderly couple came to Audium, so I tried to not be as loud as usual. I didn’t think they would end up even staying for the whole show, but they were the last ones to leave. The women came up to me with tears in her eyes afterwards. She said, “You took me back through my childhood, back to the farm I grew upon on in Iowa.” Without even trying to, we are recording a world inside ourselves as we pass through the world.

DS: Sound unlocks unconscious memories we didn’t know were inside us.

I always felt that even though I was taking in sound at Audium, it was cleansing. How does the audience affect the sound? Is it the same composition with a packed house versus an empty room?

The audiences’ attention or restlessness can be felt. It is not the same performance with the lights on. Each audience is its own thing. Their presence is enlarging. We are sculpting with sound.

www. audium. org