“Whoa,” a person close to me stated because the curtains swept open.

He, I and a few hundred different individuals had been ready in a big room on the Shed, the humanities middle at Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Portentous, woozy background music was enjoying, as if an alien encounter was imminent.

Then these curtains parted, and a a lot bigger room was revealed: the Shed’s huge McCourt area, through which a sphere, 65 toes in diameter and pocked like Swiss cheese, had been suspended from the faraway ceiling and bathed in crimson gentle.

This arresting — certainly, “whoa”-inducing — sight was the Sonic Sphere, a realization of a live performance corridor design by the sensible, peerlessly crazy composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), who impressed Germany to construct the primary one for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan.

Stockhausen, an impresario of electroacoustic experimentation and far-out notions like a string quartet enjoying inside a helicopter, imagined the audiences for his “Kugelauditorium” sitting on a sound-permeable stage throughout the sphere, in order that audio system could possibly be positioned underneath, in addition to round and over, them.

In the course of the six months that the Osaka exposition was open, a whole lot of 1000’s of individuals got here and heard taped music tailored for the in-the-round playback prospects, in addition to dwell performances. Then, for the following half century, the thought lay dormant; Carnegie Corridor and Vienna’s Musikverein remained intact, having not been changed by large spheres.

Enter, just a few years in the past, a crew led by Ed Cooke (whose biography calls him “a multidisciplinary explorer of consciousness”), the sound designer Merijn Royaards and Nicholas Christie, the challenge’s engineering director.

They’ve constructed Sonic Spheres in France, Britain, Mexico and the US. Every time, just like the plant in “Little Store of Horrors,” the contraption has grown. The Shed iteration, open by way of the top of July, is the primary to hold in midair, at a value of greater than $2 million.

As in Osaka, a few of the displays provide taped music; some, dwell. On Saturday, I climbed the various steps to the sphere’s entrance and reclined, like everybody else, in a cushty hammock-like seat, listening to the seductively sullen 2009 debut album by the British band the xx. Forty-five minutes after that was over, the pianist Igor Levit appeared in particular person to carry out, for a contemporary viewers, Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari,” from 1986.

Lights, in colours and configurations that tended to shift with the music’s beat, performed on the material pores and skin of this large Wiffle ball. However for an viewers that could possibly be seeing the high-definition stadium exhibits of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift this summer season, the visuals had been blurry, rudimentary stuff; this was the side of the presentation that felt most trapped in 1970.

And the audio expertise that emerged from the 124 audio system was unremarkable at greatest. The xx remix did properly separate the bass, arising palpably however not too closely out of the underside of the sphere, from the voices round and above. To no compelling finish, although, and the album’s whispery intimacy was supersized right into a a lot blander grandeur.

The scenario was extra distressing for Levit. Whereas the spare, spacious chords of “Palais de Mari” registered roughly cleanly, with solely slight fuzz, the sound was muddy for the Bach chorale he performed as a prelude; it was the perennial problem of amplifying acoustic devices, occasions 124. And the jittery lighting, a collaboration between Levit and the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, may hardly have been extra uncomprehending of Feldman’s glacial austerity.

For all of the souped-up spiffiness of the Sonic Sphere, the programming on Saturday felt like a retread of artists who had been extra fascinating when Alex Poots, the Shed’s creative director, introduced them throughout his stint on the Park Avenue Armory uptown.

There, in 2014, the xx did a celebrated (dwell) residency in entrance of only some dozen individuals per present. Levit, the next yr, performed Bach as a part of an ornate focus train orchestrated by Marina Abramovic. (Will he, now a fixture of New York’s extra unconventional areas, find yourself hanging upside-down on the piano as soon as the Perelman Performing Arts Heart opens this fall?)

These Armory exhibits had been extra memorable than both Shed set. Each of them on Saturday had been underneath 40 minutes, however I discovered myself getting antsy nicely earlier than time was up. Maybe the audiences at Burning Man, the techno-hippie hedonist bonanza within the Nevada desert the place a Sonic Sphere was constructed final yr, had been extra engrossed, experiencing it on more durable medication than the Coke Zero I’d had with dinner.

Sober, not one of the music was extra fascinating, efficient, illuminated or illuminating on this area than it could have been elsewhere. It was clear that the primary level was that first reveal, because the curtains opened and everybody’s telephones got here out, able to submit photographs of one thing large and glamorous on social media.

So, hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for Instagram bait — however effective, if its creators didn’t additionally hype it as “an infinite instrument of empathy” that’s “experimental, experiential and communal.” I felt, the truth is, extra distant from my fellow viewers members within the Sonic Sphere, even those reclining subsequent to me, than I’ve at most any conventional live performance corridor.

On this, the sphere is of a chunk with the opposite present providing on the Shed: a bizarre virtual-reality simulacrum of a solo piano live performance by the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March.

Empathy? Communal expertise? No, the hologram-like specter of Sakamoto was extra vivid and substantial than the opposite individuals watching with me, who, whereas I wore the VR glasses, light into clear ghostliness.

The wall textual content within the holding room for the Sonic Sphere acknowledges that know-how can isolate us from one another, however provides that mustn’t essentially be the case: “We want it to thrill and encourage us, not simply passively, however in ways in which provoke motion.”

However, as with a lot formidable, empty-headed, underwhelming, finally miserable tech, the motion that’s provoked by this costly spectacle is merely a passing second of “whoa.”