Monday, January 08, 2007

Aural History

Travelers who fly into or out of Terminal 3 at San Francisco International Airport may already know that it’s a pretty kick-ass exhibition space. They set up museum-quality installations in a long hallway next to an automatic sidewalk, and I’ve dawdled among those display cases many times while waiting for a flight. I’ve seen any number of really thought-provoking exhibits there, but the last one I saw might have been the best: a history of audio equipment. Going back to Edison’s own designs and devices, they walked us (some of us, automatically) through recording technology, playback devices, synchronization with motion pictures, and lots of consumer electronics - like a suitcase-sized proto-boombox from 1976, an elegant little MP3 player from the early ‘90s, the first magnetic tape recordation device, as big as a room and almost as cozy.... I gazed at the slablike crates for 78-rpm disks, the nouveau designs embossed on the trumpets of victrolas, and even some stuff from the here-and-now - and it all looked like it belonged there on display in a museum exhibit.

I took my time and really immersed myself in that collection, but it now occurs to me that there’s one great installation that they had to leave out. In fact, I happen to pass it on the bus quite frequently on my way to work: it’s a low-key facility on Bush Street called Audium, and it is a living museum of audio excellence - circa 1972. On the outside it’s just a windowless first floor, faced with slotted slats and painted in understated, unfashionable brown. There’s a metal grill gate across a small entryway, and the work “AUDIUM” appears on the wall above the door in bold white letters four times over, each iteration rotated 90 degrees so the four form a tidy (but tilted) square. It really doesn’t give much away from the outside.

Then, there’s the inside.  You walk in past a “labrynth” of flowing sound to an audi-torium to the gentle sound of a waterfall. The room feels like a time warp to a past future - Logan’s Run style rendered in solid-state technology. The room is circular, lit indirectly in amber - a color choice that bring to my mind both a piece of old-school audio equipment, and the accidental preservation of somthing ancient and beautiful, like a prehistoric bee with its very buzz. And speaking of the buzz, the ceiling and walls and the floor beneath the seating platform are a veritable hive of speakers - the best the Nixon era had to offer. They’re big boxy affairs, each as voluminous as a whole home theater sound system would be today. There’s about 150 of them all together, ringing and lining every surface of the room. The whole chamber is basically a speaker housing, from an era before the invention of Dolby. The seats, in concentric circles like a planetarium’s, are a rich brown color shaded not too lightly with dust and age and years of use.

It doesn’t take too long to drink in these details. The next five or ten minutes allow you to relax into the surroundings, letting the indirect light and the plinking of flowing water unravel your cognitive knots. You begin to breathe more slowly and deeply. Some autonomic unclenching eases your hypertension. And then the lights fade to black and the volume slowly rises and the show begins:

Audium was a NEA-grant-funded experiment in art and engineering, an early effort to create a purely auditory environment. Sound moves over, around, beneath and through the listeners, creating a three-dimensional environment that is purely experienced through the ears. The music is a mix of pre-recorded loops that originated in the early ‘70s and has never been updated - what makes it performance art is the way the recordings are routed through and around the room from a big analog control panel.  When I attended 15 or more yeas ago, someone sitting near me mentioned that he hadn’t been there for 20 years - but the music was basically the same. “Would you come again?,” his friend asked him. “Naw, probably not,” he admitted.

And honestly, today’s audience can’t go there expecting the installation to hold up so well these forty full years since Audium opened. You hear more auditory innovation now in a 30-second movie theater promo for THX than you do in close to an hour of Audium’s well-worn repertoire. It’s fascinating to hear, but as an artifact, it has survived beyond its acutal relevance to become true living history.

Each day that I whip past Audium on the 1BX, my earbuds bubbling syncopations directly into my brain, my iPod possessed of a larger library than radio stations had in 1972, I acknowledge that place as a monument to an unusually ephemeral phenomenon - the State of the Art. Art has moved on, and its State has been radically transformed, since Audium reduced it to a concrete pinnacle. This was as good as it got 40 years ago, exactly this.  Now it’s a museum - not a museum of the possible, but a museum of our historical experience. We’re so far past the limits Audium approaches that these limitations themselves become our reason to visit, so we can look back and see how we got where we are. We need these institutions to preserve bygone culture as it actually existed, not just as we recall it. By showing us the path we’ve historically taken, they illuminate so many more possibilities before us and help us choose wisely among them.

I consider myself very lucky that I stumbled onto the audio exhibit at SFO. As I readied myself that afternoon to board another boring jetliner so I could transcend again the bounds of space and gravity, I appreciated the reminder of the innovation and artistry engaged throughout the course of the technological development of sound reproduction that I now take so for granted that I wonder if something’s wrong if I don’t hear recorded music around me. And I’m even luckier to go past the permanent wing of that exhibit several times a week. Yeah, I’d probably go back to Audium again - just to take a little vacation in the past.