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.
Biography
Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania,
Amacher worked extensively with a set of psychoacoustic phenomena known as 'auditory distortion products'; put simply: sounds generated inside the ear that are clearly audible to the hearer. These tones have a long history in music theory and scientific research, and are still the object of disagreement and debate. In music, they are most commonly known by the name of 'combination tones', 'difference tones', and sometimes 'Tartini tones' (after the violinist Giuseppe Tartini, who is credited with discovering them). Amacher herself termed them 'ear tones' until 1992, when she discovered the work of David T. Kemp and Thomas Gold and began referring to them by the psychoacoustical terminology of 'otoacoustic emissions'. It has since become clear that some of the sounds Amacher, and indeed all musicians who have exploited this phenomenon, were generating can be attributed to a particular family of otoacoustic emissions known as 'distortion product otoacoustic emissions' (DPOAE). Occurring in response to two pure tones presented simultaneously to the ear, these tones appear to localise in or around the head, as though there were a 'tiny loudspeaker inside the ear'.
Over the years she received several major commissions in the United States and Europe with occasional work in Asia and Central and South America. Amacher received a 1998 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. In 2005, she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica (the Golden Nica) in the "Digital Musics" category for her project "TEO! A sonic sculpture". In 2009 she was invited for Brückenmusik, Cologne. At the time of her death she had been working three years on a 40-channel piece commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York.
Maryanne Amacher has been an important influence for composers such as Rhys Chatham and Thurston Moore. For the last decade of her life she taught at the Bard College MFA program.
In 2020, the Maryanne Amacher Foundation was established by a group of her close friends, peers, and collaborators, coordinated by Blank Forms, to promote and preserve Amacher’s work and legacy. The Foundation organizes exploratory seminars, public programs, research opportunities, and publications to broaden public understanding of her contributions to sound art and experimental music.
Discography and exhibits
Multimedia Installations (all works in progress)
- 1974: Everything in Air, tape
- 1975: Events 101,102, tape
- 1975: Labyrinth Gives Way to Skin, tape
- 1976: Remainder, tape
Works for Tape (unless otherwise noted)
- 2016: Naut Humon & Edwin van der Heide: Plaything - Maryanne Amacher (Performance and Lecture at CynetArt)
Further reading
- Andrew Kesin, "Day Trip Maryanne" (a documentary film of performance collaborations between Amacher and Thurston Moore)
- Handelman, Eliot. "Interview with Maryanne Amacher. Ears as Instruments: Minds Making Shapes." "From approx. 1991" (archive from 2012 August 25, accessed 2015 June 12).
- Golden, Barbara. "Conversation with Maryanne Amacher." eContact! 12.2 — Interviews (2) (April 2010). Montréal: CEC.
- Paul Kaiser "The Encircling Self In Memory of Maryanne Amacher"
- Frank J. Oteri, "Maryanne Amacher in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri"