The windowless room is completely dark and 49 occupied chairs form a circle on a red carpet. Sound emerges from all angles of the room. With the lights on, it looks like a set from a mid-century TV show based in the future. It’s not a cult meeting, but everyone is there for a shared, unique experience. If swimming in sound was possible, this is what it would feel like. Audium is a sound theater made up of 162 speakers, the only one of its kind — and not only in San Francisco, but globally.
Audium was the brain child of two SF State graduates, Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern. In the late 1950s, the two had the idea of a theater where sound danced around the room. An idea that emerged from Shaff’s composition collaboration with modern dancer Anna Halprin’s Dancer Workshop. McEachern developed the multi-speaker technology that would allow a sound-immersive experience creating the sensation of “sound sculptures.” By 1967 the two had built out a theater to perform their compositions, gradually adding more and more speakers.
When Shaff’s son, Dave, stepped into a role at Audium 10 years ago, he played some of his own compositions in the space as well as the collaborative works he created with his father. After some pushing and renovating, Dave helped open up the space for other artists’ performances. He has since had a revolving program of artists-in-residence that have shows for days or weeks in a row. Each artist and each performance is different. There are planned musical compositions, poetry readings and improvised live moments in the pitch black theater.
“It’s kind of like a jazz musician … or a conductor conducting an orchestra where even though the notes on the page stay the same, he might have a little more from the cello, a little less from the woodwinds, a little more from the brass,” said Dave Shaff about his dad’s and others’ performances in the space. “Same thing in this orchestra of speakers. He’s kind of changing from night to night, and there’s different speakers, different shapes and sizes, which are going to accent different qualities of the sound.”
Each artist that produces a work for Audium transforms the lobby of the building into an ephemeral gallery. From projected video to sculpture to mixed media on canvas, the lobby and labyrinthian hallways leading to the theater room becomes a part of the overall works of art, adding dimension, explanation and experience for the audience.
For one weekend in November, artists Lyn Patterson and Rianna Samone shared a meditative, immersive experience that included an original composition, poetry and visual art they created together titled “The Portal.” Patterson, a poet, and Samone, a sound engineer and producer, aimed to transport audiences to serene environments, mindfulness and connection.
“We kind of wanted to capture the spirit of just being in the flow, being in nature, using stillness as a portal,” said Patterson. “All the sounds surrounding that sort of help to recreate those environments and transport people in their mind, versus with moving their bodies.”
The two have collaborated on multiple mixed media art pieces and performances, at Audium and elsewhere. Often they are a culmination of sounds, frequencies, poetry and video from their own experiences in nature creating an environment where the audience interacts internally with the art.
“I just wanted people to walk out of there recognizing that this human experience is not linear,” said Samone. “Whatever you’re going through, whatever is hindering you, allow it just to simmer, and don’t hold on to it for too long. And so I really just wanted to create a space for people to be able to take a deep breath and just allow their body to just rest for a bit.”
The unconventional sound theater is the ideal space for amorphous art and performance. From ethereal sound baths like “The Portal” to Pat Mesiti-Miller’s piece titled “1000 Whispers From Our Future,” Audium gives a space for exploration unbound by the physical structures of the world.
Mesiti-Miller is an audio engineer and worked on the Ear Hustle podcast, which tells stories from inside San Quentin prison and about life post-incarceration. His Audium show description explains that his experiences working inside prisons informed the composition and the piece “transcends the confines of our physicality and ascends listeners into the waves of the infinite. [It] features the sounds of the physical structures of incarceration, the people living within them, and the power of our collective imagination and spirit.”
The concept for the show came to Mesiti-Miller from a dream wherein a late friend visited him with a message: Ask people what they want in the new world.
“It started to show itself as a story of a resistance piece against fascism, against control, against domination, against oppression, against all of these things that I’ve spent so much time working around,” said Mesiti-Miller. “It moves through three realms: the realm of the concrete, the realm of transcendence and the realm of spirit. And the guiding force through that is this collection of whispers.”
The whispers were collected through two community-building events he hosted in the East Bay. He invited his community to engage their imagination and recorded their whispers of visions of a new world. Along with the composition that will be played through 162 speakers in the theater, he will have his own mixed media sculptures in the lobby of Audium and video projections by artist Jacquelyn Serrano.
“I see that so much of our dreams are the same, and so much of what we want is the same and people are already working towards it,” said Mesiti-Miller. “Vocalizing it, taking it from the imagination and bringing it into the world, creates it.”
The artists that perform in Audium enter into a dialogue rooted in collaboration and attention with the space itself. The theater allows for liberated creation as it dissolves the boundaries of artist, audience and medium.
“I’m making work that I wouldn’t make anywhere else because of the space and what the space wants. Audium is its own thing. It’s its own instrument,” said Mesiti-Miller. “It’s been really beautiful to listen and hear what the space wants from me and what the space wants from the work, and then honoring that and following the feelings that the space is offering.”
Mesiti-Miller’s piece 1000 Whispers From Our Future will run weekends through January 3, 2026 at Audium.
