Speaker Bag

This past week I again visited the Audium, a special sonic space in San Francisco, and one that I have spent much time in over the course of many decades. The Audium has 176 carefully arranged speakers in a small room kept dark during performances, which often are explorations of spatial musique concrète — that is, of sound works made from recordings of sound, rather than using live instrumentation.

My friend Łukasz Langa, who went with me, took this shot of the interior after the performance we attended:

Founded by Stan Shaff and Doug McEachern, the Audium’s first dedicated physical space, with a quarter as many speakers, was in my longtime neighborhood, the Richmond District, in what is now a small office between a day spa and a hair salon. That was back in 1967.

By 1969, the Richmond District space had expanded to 61 speakers. Then in 1975, following an NEA grant and substantial construction work, the Audium moved to its current location, a former donut shop on Bush Street, not far from the major thoroughfare of Van Ness Avenue. Here’s a shot of my hand holding a photograph of the current space when it was still under construction, in the context of the space as it appears today. That’s Shaff’s son, David Shaff, in the baseball hat on the right.

There’s a lot to be said about any Audium show, and in addition to hearing everyday sounds and synthesized fragments move in three dimensions, I’ve had the pleasure of listening to a live jazz band perform, also in the dark. Something new-to-me always is happening at the Audium, and this time what struck me in particular was a thoughtful little design touch.

The lobby of the Audium serves as a gallery for an ever-changing series of sound art installations, and the current one plays through wall-mounted speakers. The exhibit is an audio-visual collaboration between Alex Abalos and Roco Cordova. What I noticed as I walked around wasn’t just the sounds or the projected images. It was how the sounds were being emitted: Each of the speakers is inside a cloth bag, which is pulled tight.

The carefulness of the speaker presence at the Audium reminded me of the snaking cables that caught my eye at a Marina Rosenfeld sound art exhibit back in 2021. In that case, rather than the bulky black cables being casually arranged out of necessity, they were artfully, even playfully, placed, and thus they became, in essence, part of the work, rather than a necessary byproduct.

In the Audium’s lobby, it was, frankly, nice not to be surrounded by a bunch of hard plastic and metal commercial objects, which is the standard mode for sound art. I also couldn’t help but connect the hand-tied cloth bags with the handcrafted nature of the space itself. It’s a simple touch, and one I’m surprised, in retrospect, that I don’t see more often in sound art exhibitions.

This article originally appeared in the May 13, 2026, issue of my Disquiet.com email newsletter, This Week in Sound.