PLAYTHING - Unequivocally one the most magnificent musical mavericks of the 20th century, Maryanne Amacher leaves to our mortal listening world one of her more personal live-to-multi-channel disc performances comprising one of her rare departures from structure-borne sound.
After studying with Stockhausen and working with John Cage, Amacher took off on her own psychoacoustic flight path, developing work that was critically described as; "hallucinating swarms of biological air from every direction", "3D illusions of difference-tone ear dances where the sound seems to eminating from inside your own skull!", "immense volumes that make the frequencies feel liquid -, all-enveloping buzzing rumbles wrapped in sandstorm textures".
Through multiple residency periods with Recombinant Media Labs in 2000 and before, Amacher designed a legendary 'airborne audio' "Plaything" mix, re-amplified from her hand in concert by Naut Humon and Edwin van der Heide. A 50-minute epic epiphany, chronicled by Amacher before her death, 'Plaything' is a prime example of Recombinant’s experiential archive of past lives that can still breathe and encircle us today.
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.
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". 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".
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.[9] At the time of her death she had been working for three years on a 40-channel piece commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York
Maryanne Amacher has collaborated with composers such as John Cage and 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.
Over the past half 20th-Century Maryanne Amacher was creating works of brooding magnificence; constructions in sound of such epic proportions and deep emotional resonance that you had to go to them, rather than the other way round.
Taking VR (Virtual Reality 3D sonic imaging and graphics, telepresence, and the internet) as a point of departure, Maryanne Amacher’s “Plaything" examines possibilities of individualizing sonic architectures for listeners and for spaces an approach to composition known as "perceptual geography."
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EXCERPTS AND CONVERSATIONS FROM THE ARTIST:
In the 1st Person: May 2004
EXCERPTS from Maryanne Amacher in Conversation with Frank J. Oteri
Friday, April 16, 2004—4-5 p.m.
Kingston, New York
Maryanne Amacher has always been something of an enigma to me.
A composer of vast, space-specific sonic panoramas at crushingly massive amplitudes, Amacher defies containment and commodification. She spoke about creating a music that is somehow liberated from time.
—FJO
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The Role of Music
I think I do music because I'm trying to understand. The ear-tones that I play are referred to as otoacoustic emissions. I heard those very early on when I was beginning to work, so I wanted to create a kind of music where the listener actually has vivid experiences of contributing this other sonic dimension to the music that their ears are making. My approach is more like in science, although music is emotional and everything else. I sit and listen and I hear things, then I discover how I can expand them or increase them and try to understand them. I think of them as perceptual geographies actually. "Ways of Hearing"--how we hear things far away; how we hear things close.
How suddenly in your head there almost is sound, continuing and continuing. It's particularly effective after very strong sections with enormously long fades, but it has to be done in such a way that the sonic shapes linger in your mind afterward.
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Aural Architecture
Frank J. Oteri: So what constitutes a performance? What is a performance?
Maryanne Amacher: It's just me mixing. Of course, there are visual elements, and the performance with the people, that's what I'm talking about. I'm mixing live and I'm connecting with an audience
Perception
Frank J. Oteri: When we first came over and you were playing us your work, we heard it in a whole different way. In terms of the physical nature of different people responding to sound in different ways and being a personalized experience for everybody, you discovered something very early on that's been a very key part of your vocabulary, and this is music for the "third ear." As I listened I actually felt something. I felt my ear vibrating. It was startling… It was a very intense physical experience. It felt like my ears were being tickled. It is a very, very fascinating phenomenon.
Maryanne Amacher: First of all it's all part of this notion of perceptual geographies. In 1977, the theory was proven—even though this was postulated by Thomas Gold in 1948—that the ear actually emits sound as well as receives it. So there are laboratories all over the world dedicated to this. Now see, this is what I think is funny about music—none of us know this. What in the world are we doing? I mean really to compose consciously. My first work was doing more or less pure installation work with these City Links pieces in which I brought in remote sounds. I had microphones in different remote environments and brought up those sounds in the gallery or museum or wherever. It also involved performance. The sound was alive and it came through high-quality telephone lines—Well, I think a lot of music is much more thrilling live. But my music is so dense and has so many parts that to me it sometimes sounds like all these spirits are trapped in these boxes [gestures to a speaker] trying to get out.
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IMMERSIVE AURAL ARCHITECTURES
On a departure from frontally staged concert and theater productions, an entire building or series of rooms provides a stage for the sonic and visual sets of my installations. In MUSIC FOR SOUND JOINED ROOMS (1980 ) and MINI SOUND SERIES (1985) I use the architectural features of a building to customize sound, visual, and spatial elements, creating multi-dimensional environment-oriented experiences, anticipating virtual immersion environments. As the audience moves through new scenes being created by the "Sound Characters" they navigate the expanded dimensions of a sonic world which are staged throughout the architectural site, an entire building or its rooms. The idea is to create an atmosphere that gives the drama of being inside a cinematic closeup, a form of "sonic theater" in which architecture magnifies the sensorial presence of experience. Rooms, walls, and corridors that sing.
I produce these works in location-based installation/performances that are built from "structure borne" sound (sound propagated through walls, floors, rooms, corridors), which acousticians distinguish from the *airborne" sound distributed by loudspeakers only. Creating the detailed sound design is very much like scripting a sonic choreography. In some episodes sound sweeps through the rooms; in others, converging tonal colors interact as spatial presences, intricately joining adjacent rooms; in still others a particular sound shape is emphasized to animate the aural image of a distant room, Architecture especially articulates sonic imaging, magnifying color and spatial presence. The rooms themselves become speakers producing sound, which is felt throughout the body as well as heard.
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MARYANNE AMACHER
by Marvin Minsky
In her earlier work, Maryanne Amacher explored the worlds of different forms of sounds in space.
But Amacher was never satisfied only with sound and, in the 1980's she began to turn toward more ambitious images of immersions in rooms of sound and sight. I see her work as exploring a number of important issues and the boundaries of contemporary perceptual psychology, exploring the ways that subtle environmental changes affect how we see the world from moment to moment. Amacher's work is very concerned with what happens after you see and hear: the after images and after sounds. In fact. although she works in several media, her main concern is with understanding and manipulating the perception of space and duration, with finding ways to make people feel that they are in a different (and usually more desirable) place. As she uncovers these influences she translates them through her art into ways to use the media to make changes in the local world of the watcher/listener. To be specific, I will describe a few ways in which this work seems to be important and unusual.
Subjective Transportation. By transmitting sounds from remote locations, one can begin to produce the effect that one is no longer at home, but in another city, in a storm, in some very different place… Amacher has become a master of controlling sounds that are comparatively "faint" yet produce new senses of location and orientation.
Spatial Sound Sculpture. By combining and modulating several remote sources, she can create new environments, exploiting other new effects. Much of art involves attempts at superimposing different structures, but Amacher's work shows that one can do far more with overlays of sound than anyone would have expected. The room becomes new kinds of places, some unlike any past experiences.
Localizations and Difference – Beats. Workers in psychoacoustics have long known that there are certain non-linear effects of certain higher frequency sounds that produce subjective localizations of their sources in surprising places, near or apparently inside the listener's head, for example. It seems very likely that some of the secrets of classical and modern orchestration effects depend on these sometimes subliminal influences which, in her art, Amacher attempts to isolate and then combine again into new structures and textures.
I have the impression that Amacher has discovered other such effects that are not yet understood by the psychoacoustic community, as a result of her extraordinary care and persistence. Now she wants to pursue her new ideas in a series of pieces, each a room of more complete experience. There are all too few individuals who possess her power, courage, intelligence, and sensitivity but the stages she builds will enable the rest of us to experience these same qualities.
February 3, 1988
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NOTES WITHOUT EARS
If I had not had studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen, it is very likely I would have gone on to pursue pure biochemistry—looking inside at the “life” of cells and the critical shaping of their molecular structures. My conventional academic background in music provided no approach to understanding or investigating what mattered most to me about the physical nature of sound, our responses to it perceptually, and the creation of the sonic worlds I imagined! All of this began with Stockhausen. How to communicate in fewer words the unique treasure of those studies!
Imagine what it was to encounter Stockhausen’s supreme energy to discover, to explore entirely new ways of presenting music, to delve into the interacting energy of the spectrum itself, and to listen in to the inner life of sounds themselves! And perhaps even more important, his incisive attention to the experiential, to observing sensorial features and how we respond to the acoustic information. One of his first questions to me was: “Do you want the tones to shimmer inside?”
All of this was in stark contrast to most musical practice, where composing usually amounts to procedures of simply rearranging and modifying preexistent musical figures—that is, other men’s tunes—and giving them a personalized framework in time (“notes without ears”). Silicon composers are now achieving this faster, and often better.
Stockhausen understood many of the problems built up over time accompanying the habitual practice of music: that it becomes difficult to “hear” new thoughts. His sonic investigations were designed consciously, to transform such automatic thought processes. He realized new, more fertile approaches were needed.
Stockhausen’s example at this critical time in my life enabled me to stretch my mind with great vigor, reinforcing my desire to hear, think, and explore the “unformulated” in order to discover the unique sonic worlds I hoped to shape.