From his early career in the 1950s as a trumpet player, composer and teacher, Stan Shaff gravitated towards stretching boundaries and shaping new forms. His friendship and collaboration with painter and sculptor Seymour Locks expanded his grounding in the arts. His high school band students performed improvisational light-sound programs, including one at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; he explored the nature of sound in relation to movement with Ann Halprin’s Dancers Workshop; curious about sound bereft of traditional tools and structure, he turned to tape composition, working and performing with composers involved with the Tape Music Center. By the late 1950s, Shaff’s work with audio tape led to the need to externally realize sound in the way he conceived of it: as an energy in space. In 1959 Shaff met fellow musician and teacher Douglas McEachern, whose background in electronics enabled him to develop original equipment systems for live, spatial performances. From the first public presentation of these ideas in 1960 through succeeding decades of work with the co-creation and development of the sound theatre AUDIUM — constructed specifically for choreographing sound in space — Shaff  has sought to explore and expand  the language of space in music composition and performance.