Maryanne Amacher was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

 and installation artist.

Biography

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

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

 on a full scholarship where she received a B.F.A in 1964. While there she studied composition with George Rochberg

George Rochberg

George Rochberg was an American composer of contemporary classical music.-Life:Rochberg was born in Paterson, New Jersey. He attended the Mannes College of Music, where his teachers included George Szell and Hans Weisse, and the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied with Rosario Scalero and...

 and Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. Another critic calls him "one of the great visionaries of 20th-century music"...

. Subsequently, she did graduate work in acoustics and computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

.

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

WBFO

WBFO, broadcast on 88.7 FM, is the largest NPR member station for Buffalo, New York. It is broadcast from the South campus of the University at Buffalo....

. There were 21 other pieces in the "City Links" series, though many details are not yet known. 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 '67 work in Buffalo.

Her major pieces have almost exclusively been site specific, often using many loudspeakers to create what she called "structure borne sound", which is a differentiation with "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/"precense". Amacher's early work is best represented in the 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 which she created, that is unique in its use of architecture and serialized narrative.

She worked extensively with the physiological (not psychoacoustic) phenomenon called otoacoustic emission

Otoacoustic emission

An otoacoustic emission is a sound which is generated from within the inner ear. Having been predicted by Thomas Gold in 1948, its existence was first demonstrated experimentally by David Kemp in 1978 and otoacoustic emissions have since been shown to arise by a number of different cellular...

, 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. It's not yet adequately researched and clear as to whether these works are solely from otoacoustic emissions or perhaps also combination and difference tones. The subtitle of her first Tzadik Records

Tzadik Records

Tzadik Records is a record label based in New York City specialising in avant-garde and experimental music. The label was established by the eclectic composer and saxophonist John Zorn in 1995; Zorn is the executive producer of all Tzadik releases...

 album Sound Characters (Making the Third Ear) references these "ear tones". Amacher describes this phenomenon:
Over the years she received several major commissions in the United States and Europe with occasional work in Asia and Central and South America. In 1998 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts

Foundation for Contemporary Arts

Foundation for Contemporary Arts , originally known as Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, is a nonprofit based foundation in New York City founded by artists Jasper Johns , John Cage, Elaine de Kooning and others in 1963. FCA offers financial support and recognition to contemporary...

 Grants to Artists Award. In 2005, she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica

Prix Ars Electronica

The Prix Ars Electronica is one of the most important yearly prizes in the field of electronic and interactive art, computer animation, digital culture and music...

 (the Golden Nica) in the "Digital Musics" category for her project "TEO! A sonic sculpture". 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

Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center

The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center is a multi-venue arts center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, which opened on October 3, 2008.The director of EMPAC is Johannes Goebel...

 in Troy, New York.

She never held a full-time job after being a typist in the early 1960s. For the last decade of her life she taught at the Bard College

Bard College

Bard College, founded in 1860 as "St. Stephen's College", is a small four-year liberal arts college located in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.-Location:...

 MFA program.

External links

• The Maryanne Amacher Archive (primary sources and to support the preservation of her work): http://www.maryanneamacher.org
• Golden, Barbara. “Conversation with Maryanne Amacher.” eContact! 12.2 — Interviews (2) (April 2010). Montréal: CEC
  Canadian Electroacoustic Community
  Founded in 1986, La Communauté électroacoustique canadienne / The Canadian Electroacoustic Community is Canada’s national electroacoustic / computer music / sonic arts organization and as such is dedicated to promoting this progressive art form in its broadest definition: from “pure” acousmatic...
  
  .
• Handelman, Eliot. “Interview with Maryanne Amacher. Ears as Instruments: Minds Making Shapes.” From approx. 1991. http://www.colba.net/~eliot/amacher.htm
• http://archive.futuresonic.com/sensesonic/archive/MARYANNE/msg-0001.html