Audium-Theatre of Sound

You are approaching the Audium, a theater designed specifically for the art of sound movement. It stands as the only facility in the world built from the ground up as a dedicated instrument for spatial audio. While most theaters focus your attention on a stage, this space is engineered to make you forget the room exists entirely. The theater is a structure built within another building, featuring a foyer that transitions into a sound labyrinth. This winding hallway serves as a sensory buffer, stripping away the noise of the outside city to prepare your ears for what lies ahead. Once you enter the main performance space, you will find forty-nine seats arranged in concentric circles, all facing inward. The performance environment relies on 176 speakers hidden within the walls, the floating floor, and the suspended ceiling. During each show, the lights are extinguished until the room is in complete darkness. A performer sits at a custom-built console, manually directing sounds through these speakers to create what the founders called sound sculptures. They manipulate the direction, speed, and intensity of audio, making sounds feel as though they are physically traveling over, under, and around you. The Audium was established by composer Stan Shaff and technical designer Doug McEachern in the late 1960s. They were pioneers in the electronic music scene who wanted to move sound in the same way dancers move their bodies. They spent years refining their technology, eventually securing a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to construct this permanent home on Bush Street. Since its opening in 1975, the theater has maintained a tradition of weekly performances that treat the entire building as a single, living instrument.