“A baby albino giraffe.” This is what flutes sound like, according to Björk. (That’s a real, and largely mute, creature, by the way.)

There are seven flute players, all women, in Björk’s latest live extravaganza, “Cornucopia.” She mentioned the giraffes as a way to translate her sonic vision to her collaborators. “Like, they’re kind of furry and they’re kind of clean,” she said of the animals, “but they’re not as clean as you think, because they’re actually giraffes.”

“If that makes any sense,” she added.

As an iconoclastic artist — a punk-turned-pop-turned-experimental singer, multimedia visionary, misfit-fashion darling, and proto-futurist with a lasting fixation on the melding of nature and technology — Björk, 53, is used to explaining her leaps of imagination. Somehow, coming in her lilting voice, it works. The flute, for example, was her childhood instrument, but she rebelled against classical composers and learned contemporary, atonal work — the furrier-sounding stuff.

“Cornucopia,” a major commission from the Shed, the new arts venue at Hudson Yards on the West Side of Manhattan, is characteristically ambitious — billed as Björk’s “most elaborate staged concert to date.” Opening Thursday, it includes a 50-member Icelandic young people’s choir, a custom-made reverb chamber, mesmerizing video projections, carefully positioned 360-degree sound and multiple bespoke instruments, some used for mere moments.