By Megan Robertson

There are some spaces that take you back to another time, another way of being. On Bush Street at Franklin Street, that space is Audium, and that time is a 1960s San Francisco.

During the “Summer of Love” in 1967, on the other side of the Panhandle from Haight-Ashbury, Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern held up in a building on Clement Street and Fourth Avenue to create Audium, globally renowned today as a “theater of sound.”

“It’s the only theater of sound in the world,” said Dave Shaff, Stan Shaff’s son who now runs the venue. “You can’t find this anywhere else. San Francisco, it’s the heart of technology, (and Audium has) always been kind of a funky, up-by-the-bootstraps kind of space. It has never been sponsored by any kind of corporate entity.”

McEachern and Stan Shaff started with the idea of wanting to create “a unique sound-space experience in a controlled environment,” according to the space’s archival materials. In the years leading up to the first public show in 1967, Stan Shaff – a trumpet player by trade – was working on compositions for a dance troupe.

“(My dad) was like, ‘I want to be able to move my sound the same way these dancers are moving their body.’ And that was the impetus,” Dave Shaff said.

While Audium is no longer housed on Clement Street, due to its building being sold in 1970, the artistic spirit developed in the Richmond is prevalent in its space on Cathedral Hill. With 176 surround-sound speakers, listeners are invited to experience “sound sculptures,” as Audium likes to call it.

The space is intimate, with only 49 seats. Audience members are led into the theater through a hexagonal entryway that feels akin to boarding a spaceship. After being guided through a winding, dark hallway, listeners are invited to sit in total darkness and listen.

“In the face of a world where attention is being tugged apart, Audium’s mission is to amplify perceptual awareness in worlds of sound and space,” Audium’s website reads.

What once was a family venture has now expanded to invite more, and a wider range, of artists to work in the space. With its artist residency program, now in its fourth year, Bay Area artists are invited to design soundscapes and installations.

With “New Voices IV,” Audium’s residency performance which opened last month, artists Shanti Lalita, Phillip Laurent and Brianna Marela have created works about empowerment, connection and loss. The cohort’s work is combined into one, three-act performance, with each sound installation running for approximately 20 minutes. Between each installation, audience members are led back into the lobby for an “activation.” For this show, the activations take shape as performances, sung and spoken by the artists. Each artist has taken a different approach to working and presenting in the space. While some perform live vocally, all three perform live spatialization, running their spatial sound performances in-person at each show.

Lalita is a cellist and poet originally from Puerto Rico. Their work “SENSE/LESS,” is a “multimedia, multi-sensory experience confronting the societal relationship to marginalized bodies,” according to their artist statement.

The space at Audium “offers, but it also demands,” Lalita said. “It’s this interesting thing of starting with this grandiose idea of like, ‘Wow, look at all these speakers, all the possibilities,’ and then kind of being grounded by what is technically possible. It’s learning to still reach for that goal through the technical obstacles.”

Before their audio work is on display each show, Lalita’s performs a “prologue” in the lobby, inviting audience members to use their sense of smell and taste, laying the foundation for their other senses to be activated in the sound installation.

Marela, a vocalist originally from Seattle, also performs live to the audience, both in the lobby and then in the dark in the theater. Combining her vocal performance with recorded audio and soundscapes, her work “Qué Pena” touches on the grief of losing her father and of never having attained fluency in her family’s native Spanish.

“There’s something about this piece that feels like it has kind of existed around me, like it’s been floating around me, and all I needed was the opportunity to present it,” Marela said. “Presenting it in this space in the dark felt really critical to what this piece is, because it’s so vulnerable. It was really special knowing that people wouldn’t be able to see me, but I’d be able to be pouring my heart out in this way.”

Laurent is the only performer whose work is completely instrumental, based in jazz instrumentation. As an organist, keyboardist and synthesist originally from Washington, D.C., his work “Remote Viewing,” embraces “music as an augmentation of the visual act,” according to his artistic statement.

“A lot of it is how to sort of synthesize visual experiences into music,” Laurent said.

Although each resident approaches the space in a unique way, they are united in their passion for the audio method of artistic expression and spatial sound.

“(Audium) has been able to thrive because of a general curiosity of people who live here and people who visit here. So that is a type of lifeblood that does rely on people going out and being willing to experience something just because,” he said. “It’s not something (where) you can experience the music in stereo, but this is a site-specific presentation of work, and you’ve got to come to the site. There’s something really refreshing about that.”

Lalita added, “It is such a unique experience. As a person who has been around traveling and in music for a really long time, I’ve never come across another space like Audium. It really does something to your soul to go into that space and sit in the dark and feel the sound move. It really is unlike anything else.”

Audium’s “New Works IV” is running until April 5. Information is available and tickets can be purchased at audium.org. A limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets are available on a first come, first served basis at the box office before shows. The theater is located at 1616 Bush St.