Hearing is believing

Remember, if you can, the feeling of being a child, closing your eyes and listening to a captivating bedtime story; the way in which it could spark your imagination and take you on a journey to another world. This weekend, Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall will host several performances by EarFilms: an immersive, audio experience that melds gripping storytelling with three-dimensional surround sound, with the goal of offering audiences a vivid way to engage their ears and imaginations. It’s an antidote, creators say, to a world overrun by screens and visual input.

“Reading is something that’s always such an imaginative experience … seeing the movie version is always sort of disappointing,” EarFilms founder Daniel Marcus Clark said. “The opportunity we get of adding sound (into storytelling) is that you can kind of land in a moment, a very definite moment that’s happening.”

When you attend a performance of “To Sleep To Dream” (the particular EarFilms show coming to Stanford) you’re given a special, “very comfortable,” blindfold to help you focus. A meticulously designed and mixed soundtrack creates a multidimensional, “hyper-real” listening environment. Footsteps sneak up behind you; music soars; characters seem to live and breath all around you. Imaginations are activated in the darkness of the concert hall.

“You’re led into the experience of the story,” Clark said, “and what happens over the next 90 minutes is kind of down to you.”

The story of “To Sleep To Dream” is a haunting one, set in a dystopian society in which dreaming is outlawed. Dreamers join an underground resistance movement and embark on a magical journey through the subconscious to reclaim the power of dreams and imagination for all.

To Clark, working with sound rather than optics opens up more creative possibilities.

“It’s an interesting sense because — and this is my own opinion — we’re at a point where we’re so used to visual bombardment that it’s become a little bit dulled,” he said. “Gone are the days of the train coming toward the screen causing people to run, but sound still gets a jump. Working with sound alone, there’s still space to trick the mind and create a real illusion.”

Sound, he said, is both emotionally and physically visceral, “literally waves that pass through you that cause the water in you to vibrate.”

He recalled his own attachment to the characters brought to life by EarFilms.

“We had a very funny moment when we were making the show, mixing one of the scenes,” he said. The team decided to take a break midway through working on a scene in which a character was walking around his flat. “We stopped and he was halfway across the apartment — I think he was putting on his trousers. I remember feeling a great responsibility for the character (during the break) — ‘He’s still there waiting!'”

The show, which has toured around the U.K., Australia and the U.S. to critical acclaim, can work in a variety of spaces, as long as the crew is able to deaden the room, creating an acoustically neutral setting for the speakers and sound system.

The EarFilms team worked hard to create as robust an experience as possible for listeners, with all the elements carefully designed, through trial and error, to be most effective. The goal, Clark said, is to get people to “just give over to their imagination,” which involves fine-tuning the language used in the storytelling, the technical integration of sounds, and the timing and balance between sound effects, narration, music and “space to imagine,” Clark said.

Clark, who’s long been interested in experimenting with storytelling, music and technology, founded EarFilms in his native England. With his sonorous voice and British accent, he also serves as the live narrator of EarFilms’ events, interacting with the pre-recorded soundtrack, acting as a bridge between the audience and the story. And though the precise execution of the soundtrack means that Clark’s narration must be fairly tightly scripted, he said there’s still a bit of room to experiment. “It’s fascinating how just changing the timing slightly can change the audience’s experiences.”

Clark said each listener responds to the audio stimuli in different ways.

“It’s always extraordinary hearing how differently each audience member’s imaginations work. There was a naive thought at first that everyone imagines visually. Actually, what we’re discovering more and more is that we all imagine differently. All our internal worlds work differently,” he said. Some audience members have asked if scents were released into the room, the scene so vividly set by the audio that their senses of smell were tricked. Others have been sure the room’s temperature was adjusted to match the story’s setting.

“We had a group of dancers when we did a showcase in New York. You could see their shoulders all moving, they had this kinesthetic response” to the show, Clark said. He wonders if the ways in which the show engages people’s senses and imaginations differently is connected to “how we learn and how we see the world. It brings up a big wider question.”

He considers EarFilms part of the continuum of storytelling traditions, from ancient epics to the golden age of radio to podcasts.

“We feel really strongly that we’re continuing a tradition that’s gone on a very long time,” he said, harkening back to the “magical time” in which families in days of old would gather around the wireless to follow a favorite story. “The only thing we’ve added to that is extreme technology and blindfolds.”

What: “To Sleep To Dream” by EarFilms

Where: Bing Concert Hall, 327 Lasuen St., Stanford.

When: Friday, April 7, through Sunday, April 9 (five performances; see online for schedule)

Cost: $15-$50

Info: Go to Stanford Live and EarFilms.