In the soaring gallery, the walls are bare, gray. There’s nothing to look at, except for a circle of 40 loudspeakers standing primly like watchful guards. Yet through the space, a landscape of sound moves like a wave of ever-shifting color, haunting and serene.

An intensely aural experience in a place usually filled with the visual, Canadian artist Janet Cardiff’s sound installation “The Forty Part Motet” re-creates one of the most complex Renaissance choral works in the upper gallery at Tacoma Art Museum. Thomas Tallis’ motet “Spem in Alium” is rarely heard live, as it requires a choir split into 40 separate vocal lines. Yet it’s one of the most beautiful works ever written, the complexity creating unique aural patterns. So, to rework it as a sound installation, a continuous 40-channel recording with a concert hall acoustic, is ideal.

Tallis (1505-1585) was not only one of the most skilled composers of the English Renaissance, he was one of the luckiest, or at least most politically astute. Serving under four monarchs who alternated between vigilantly Protestant and zealously Catholic, he not only managed to keep his head but keep his post as a court composer.

His music is polyphonic, with many lines going their own way through subtly changing harmonies. “Spem in Alium,” the Latin text taken from a prayer of hope from the book of Judith, which is found in Roman Catholic Old Testaments, and was written at the height of his career in 1573.

In her installation, widely exhibited throughout Europe and Canada but debuting in the Northwest, Cardiff has taken a recording of the motet by the Salisbury Cathedral Choir and channeled each voice through its own head-height speaker.

Her arrangement of the eight five-voice choirs in a clockwise circle is intelligent, bringing out the passing of themes and the antiphony between choirs. Standing in the center, waves of sound flow around you; walk closer, and you can hear each choir member, including several minutes of coughing, rustling and chuckling preceding the performance.

To a nonmusician, this installation may seem, as curator Rock Hushka puts it, “a stunning and daring work of art.” But to anyone who’s sung in a choir or played in an orchestra, it’s a logical way to replicate for audience members the intense, irreplaceable feeling you get when you’re literally in the middle of a piece of music.

Douglas Fullington, director of Seattle’s Tudor Choir, who will be performing a companion Tallis concert this Saturday, agrees.

“It’s a kind of genius, the way Cardiff has done this,” he says. “The average person gets to be in the middle of it, to participate in it in a way they never would have.” Fullington points out that, practically, you could never set up “Spem in Alium” as a performance in-the-round, since with several hundred audience members in the middle, the choir would be too far apart to hear each other. There’s another subtle factor that’s really nice about Cardiff’s work, and that’s getting much closer to a performance than a CD ever could. The Salisbury choir, men and boys, is amateur: Walk close to a speaker, and you’ll hear occasional pitch wavers, breathy tone, midphrase breathing. Far from reducing the effect, it enhances it.

“It’s kind of cool; there’s a human element to it,” points out Fullington. “You can hear the boys laughing.”

The only problem with having a disembodied choral performance is – well – the lack of physical body. Even once you get past the visual weirdness (the speakers look oddly alien, in that minimalist gray gallery) there’s a distinct lack of tangible vibration in the sound. It flicks on and off like a light bulb, as Fullington puts it.

But that’s nothing to the quite divine feeling of having Tallis’ incredible sound-sculpting made real around you, sweeping like a mountain range, almost overwhelming in beauty. It’s like a vision of heaven you can hear, but can’t quite see.

Rosemary Ponnekanti: 253-597-8568

What: Janet Cardiff, “The Forty Part Motet”

When: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-8 p.m. third Thursdays, noon-5 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 7

Related Event: Tudor Choir performance of works by Thomas Tallis, 6:30 p.m. Saturday; free with admission

Where: Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Ave., Tacoma

Admission: $7.50 adults; $6.50 students, military, seniors; free for ages 5 and younger and on third Thursdays

Information: 253-272-4258, www.tacomaartmuseum.org