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Maryanne Amacher was born on February 25, 1938 in Kane, Pennsylvania and died on October 22, 2009 in Rhinebeck, New York. She was 71 years old. One of electronic music's legendary mavericks, Amacher reveled in powerful, high-volume sensory assaults. She was truly a sculptor of sound, working primarily in site-specific works, relying on the built environment, distance, and spatial perception to shape her works. Today on Radio Roaming, we're going to briefly touch upon two of the major areas of her research: long distance music, and otoacoustic emissions. 

CITY LINKS

In the late 1960s, while at SUNY-Buffalo, Amacher pioneered what came to be referred to as "telematic performance", but that she simply called at the time “long distance music". This work would later crystallize into her renowned City Links series of 22 individual works. These site-related pieces relied on what she called "structure borne sound" (differentiating it from "airborne sound"). 

The first iteration of City Links was broadcast in 1967 on WBFO radio, Buffalo New York. Eight microphones were placed throughout the city and broadcast to a room over a 28-hour period. A common feature of this work was the use of dedicated, FM-radio quality telephone lines to connect the sound environments of different sites into the same space. 

Later, in 1972 while in residence at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, Amacher installed a microphone at the Boston Harbor which broadcast to her studio, 24 hours a day for three years. 

Speaking at Ars Electronica in 1989, she had this to say about that research: 

"After midnight, when things really quieted down, I could then begin to absorb [the sounds]. It was one factor of living with this live sound like this, almost the way you would turn on your radio or turn on records, I was able to live with this. But what was important to me is that i really learned what interested me, and I had no way to learn this in music. I learned about spatial perception and spatial dimenstion in sound. I could hear sound very far away and close up, things disappearing and appearing. These are factors in my music, when i began, that interested me. But in our traditional musical presentations, everything is usually on a stage or in one place. So it wasn't that I wanted the sounds of birds or the sounds of the harbor, or any of these sounds. I really wanted much more to experience and learn about hearing, so that i could make an interval or I could make an instrument in my music that perhaps had some kind of similarity to the dimensions that we acctually hear in life. And i think it's one extension when John Cage talked about the sounds around us; my interest is much more in how as we, as human perceivers, are experiencing these sounds."

-Maryanne Amacher speaking at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria 1989

Of course, the nature of the City Links series defies perception outside of its broadcast space and time. There are, however, some extant archival recordings that we'll listen to now. The first is Living Sound for her "Sound-Joined Rooms" series from 1980. This next piece is from the album "Imaginary Landscapes: New Electronic Music". Released on Nonesuch REcords in 1989, this is Excerpt from Stain - The Music Rooms (Live Version)

OTOACOUSTICS

During her time as a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT (1972-76), Amacher began a rigorous experimental investigation into the psychoacoustic dimensions of human perception. She started working with a set of phenomena known as "auditory distortion products" - sounds generated inside the ear that are clearly audible to the hearer. In music, they are most commonly known by the name of 'combination tones' or 'difference tones'. Amacher was the first to systematically explore the musical use of these phenomena using electroacoustic sound technologies.

To get a sense of what these musics sounded like in the room, here's what reviewer Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times after an Amacher performance at the Kitchen in 1988

“With three tape recorders and a huge set of speakers spread out around a darkened room, she used immense volume to make sound feel liquid, all-enveloping, as if it were pouring into ears, between fingers and through hair. Ms. Amacher layered her noises - buzzing tones wrapped in sandstorm textures, rumblings like faraway thunder storms late at night, an idling motorcycle, jets swooping by - into an apocalyptic, terrifying landscape.”

And here's a quote from Amacher interviewed in 1991 for Mondo2000 magazine 

"Our ears act as instruments in responding to music, sounding their own tones in addition to the music in the room, like another instrument joining the orchestra. Neuroanatomy responds and gives shape to the most subtle traces of acoustic information. We hear tones other than the given acoustic toes taking their shape inside our ears, as the membrane vibrates in response to the given acoustic tones. In music as we know it, such tone responses have been repressed. They have a subliminal existence, suppressed within the complex timbres of music. We're not aware that they exist, or that we're actually creating them as listeners. The experience of our own processing isn't available to us. I want to release this music, bring it out of subliminal existence. I want to make a music that is directed past the processing and control of acoustic information, and foes into the network of the nervous system to what we do with this information perceptually."

-Maryanne Amacher in an interview with Dr. Eliot Handelman in about 1991 for Mondo2000 magazine

In 1999 she released an album of this music on Tzadik Records called "Sound Characters (Making The Third Ear)"

We'll listen to track 2 "Tower", track 3 "Synaptic Island (excerpt VM2 from the Levi-Montalcini Variations)", and track 7 "A Step Into It, Imagining 1001 Years (excerpt Entering Ancient Rooms)."

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Radio Roaming bounces across the electromagnetic spectrum, exploring the many possibilities of experimentation with sending and receiving. Produced by Wave Farm staff members, each episode features a selection of contemporary and/or historical radio and transmission art, with the aim of expanding the Wave Farm Radio Art and Transmission Art Archives.