Maryanne Amacher
| Maryanne Amacher | |
|---|---|
Maryanne Amacher 2006-10-06
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| Background information | |
| Born |
February 25, 1938 Kane, Pennsylvania |
| Died | October 22, 2009 (aged 71) |
| Genres | Electronic music, experimental music |
| Occupation(s) | Composer, installation artist |
| Instruments | Piano |
| Website | www |
Maryanne Amacher (February 25, 1938 – October 22, 2009) was an American composer and installation artist. She is known for working extensively with a family of psychoacoustic phenomena called auditory distortion products (also known as distortion product otoacoustic emissions and combination tones), in which the ears themselves produce audible sound.
Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania, to an American nurse and a Swiss freight train worker. As the only child, she grew up playing the piano. Amacher left Kane to attend the University of Pennsylvania on a full scholarship where she received a B.F.A in 1964. While there she studied composition with George Rochberg and .
She also studied composition in Salzburg, Austria, and Dartington, England. Subsequently, she did graduate work in acoustics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
While in residence at the University of Buffalo, in 1967, she created City Links: Buffalo, a 28-hour piece using 5 microphones in different parts of the city, broadcast live by radio station WBFO. There were 21 other pieces in the "City Links" series, and more information can be found in the brochure for an exhibition on the series by Ludlow 38 in NYC (available on their website). A common feature was the use of dedicated, FM radio quality telephone (0–15,000 Hz range) lines to connect the sound environments of different sites into the same space, a very early example of what is now called "telematic performance" and preceded much more famous examples of this by Max Neuhaus and others. Neuhaus was involved with the original 1967 work in Buffalo.
Her major pieces have almost exclusively been site specific, often using many loudspeakers to create what she called "structure borne sound", differentiating it from "airborne sound", the paradox intentional. By using many diffuse sound sources (either not in the space or speakers facing at the walls or floors) she would create the psychoacoustic illusions of sound shapes or "presence". Amacher's early work is best represented in three series of multimedia installations produced in the United States, Europe, and Japan: the sonic telepresence series, "City Links 1–22" (1967– ); the architecturally staged "Music for Sound-Joined Rooms" (1980– ); and the "Mini-Sound Series" (1985– ) a new multimedia form she created that is unique in its use of architecture and serialized narrative.
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