RIP Maryanne Amacher

via Wikipedia
"She worked extensively with the physiological (not psychoacoustic) phenomenon called otoacoustic emission, in which the ears themselves act as sound generating devices. Amacher composed several "ear dances" designed to stimulate clear "third" tones coming from the listener's ears. The subtitle of her first Tzadik Records album Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) references these "ear tones".

'When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room. Tones 'dance' in the immediate space of their body, around them like a sonic wrap, cascade inside ears, and out to space in front of their eyes ... Do not be alarmed! Your ears are not behaving strange or being damaged! ... these virtual tones are a natural and very real physical aspect of auditory perception, similar to the fusing of two images resulting in a third three dimensional image in binocular perception ... I want to release this music which is produced by the listener ...'"

Amacher & Moore 1/2

YouTube via castelolx. "clip from 'daytrip maryanne'"

The following is an excerpt from this obit by Alvin Curran:
"Maybe it was at the N.Y.U. electronic music studio in an old movie house on Fourth Street in the late 1960s. Mort Subotnick invited her; she slept in a kind of mop closet with her precious tapes, magnetic, bubbly, bizarre, but hard-wired to things I was just beginning to intuit.

Or was it 1970, when she piled into Frederic Rzewski’s mother’s car, all bundled up, aviator cap and all, along with Serge Tcherepnin and Anthony Braxton to whiz off from the Upper West Side on a brief Musica Elettronica Viva early spring tour of Midwestern colleges? These were long hauls on Interstate 80, wet roads, stoned passengers, utopian destinations, laughing singing rapping hyping. Nothing mattered it seemed, except that the youthful skins we were all wrapped in should bestow us eternal life and that the world out there should be waiting for the revolution we were about to deliver from the contents of the trunk of this vintage car."

Maryanne Amacher


Maryanne Amacher on Wikipedia
http://www.maryanneamacher.org
This one in via Brian Comnes.

Update via Michael Trigilio in the comments:
"Truly an inspiration - - I worked briefly with her while a graduate student. My collaborative radio project, Neighborhood Public Radio, is doing a piece in homage to Maryanne called HOLD YOUR PHONE UP for a show at the contemporary museum in Baltimore - - - anyone can call 1-888-361-4NPR and we'll process the sounds we hear (in honor of her seminal City Links projects)."