maryanne amacher

history maynne amacher

― k3vin k., Friday, October 23, 2009 11:53 AM (3 days ago)

um, i wanna apologize if this came off as insensitive - didnt read the thread and it was just a lame attempt at a pun

oddly fitting, though, jeesh

I knew we were going to have to basically wait for someone else to go through her tapes for her, I just feared that such a person wasn't going to be there at the right moment, and when I asked her once about her archives she referred to them with total contempt. but is seems like the archives are in the right hands, he gets it, lucky for history

oh shitttttttttttttt. Head Rhythm 1 is still my favorite; maryanne truly had a grasp like few others on the primary colors of music and sound. RIP.

That Wire piece and Sound Characters both had a big impact on me in 1999, saw many new possibilities in sound. R.I.P.

and when I asked her once about her archives she referred to them with total contempt. but is seems like the archives are in the right hands, he gets it, lucky for history

Now I'm wondering whether in a Kafka-Max Brod vein as to whether she wanted them destroyed or what, and if so, whether to release the archives at all...

For all the terrible artists that released binaural recordings, lets hope that Amacher played around with a dummy head microphone pair to document some installations. I've only have the two Tzadik albums, but even from my mid-range stereo setup I sense that her music would benefit from binaural headphone recordings more than any other.

Now I'm wondering whether in a Kafka-Max Brod vein as to whether she wanted them destroyed or what, and if so, whether to release the archives at all...

Matt #2's repost of micah silver's "marching instructions" from maryanne makes it seem like she wanted them released, even if she didn't feel comfortable doing it herself.

The archive blog's been busy: http://maryanneamacher.org/

Nice to see reposts of some of her articles like 'Composing Perceptual Geographies', I think we do need a book compiling her writing and interviews. Several friends who are averse to high-decibel concert situations have said they're looking forward to the book more than the tapes.

great article & my favorite recent picture of her, much closer to capturing what she really looked like than most

http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=6169

I sure hope there are some recordings of Amacher playing with MEV out there somewhere.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/in-memory-of-maryanne-amacher/?emc=eta1

Also liked this recommendation written by Marvin Minsky posted to the archive.

http://www.maryanneamacher.org/Amacher_Archive_Project/Entries/2009/10/24_Marvin_minsky_on_maryanne.html

nice to see nytimes put Curran's 'Maryanne Amacher' opinion blog at the very top of their website roll!

That my "ears were emitting sounds" as well as receiving them, that is hearing other acoustically produced tones at the same time, was incredible to me, a totally unique amazing experience at the time

http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/emr/articles/amacher.pdf

Thanks, MP! (hope you're well)

I'm in horrible shape

Even more shocking is that thirty years had gone by since the very first proposal, that the ear contained an advanced amplifier mecahnism which makes it an active amplifier of its own sounds, was introduced by the extraordinary Thomas Gold in 1948

and of course the first thing that comes to mind is the connection with David Tudor's 'Rainforest' which uses transducer speakers to transform hundreds of ordinary objects into feedback mechanisms; but it turns out that in fact they are not just feedback mechanisms, attaching the transducers is actually producing behavior which has precedent in the human body, he is transforming those objects into hundreds of models of the human ear

=(

The medical profession still has not got a clue as to why 15 kilocycles should be coming out of somebody's ears

Labyrinth Gives Way To Skin

Humans seem to need music. It is around us much of the time, and is happening to us. My work involves developing a music which lets us know experientially that given acoustic intervals are indeed affecting responses in our ears and brain, and lets us hear some of these responses vividly.

oh, milton.

The piano made harmony easily accessible to composers; the computer now allows us to become familiar with response tones. (Perhaps it is because the complexities are more equally matched here -- why we can begin to compose with complex human processing, previously considered subjective.)

oh my fucking god the last five paragraphs

that's it; I have to leave work

she was a true and complete genius

it's interesting to contrast her essays with laurie spiegel's at around the same time

surreptitiously posted 'online', the best archival performance of MA I've heard. much more accurate picture of what she was up to than the two official CDs. this is the room recording of the Music Gallery concert in Toronto mentioned upthread from 1982, transferred from cassette by sund4r

http://soundcloud.com/artpractical/maryanne-amacher-clip-for

does this need to be at overwhelming volume for me to appreciate it? I finally got speakers that could handle cranking the Tzadik disc and it was a very interesting effect.

this one is less dependent on volume. but volume does help, and so do headphones.

and also taking the recording seriously helps. I almost feel uncomfortable just seeing this posted online. It's not just another file.

wow, excited to listen to this.

thanks

march 1975

http://barryschrader.com.hostbaby.com/img/Writing/CURRENTS/Ripert_2.jpg

http://www.barryschrader.com/currents_at_theatre_vanguard/

http://noise-park.tumblr.com/post/34827930387/maryanne-amacher

A++

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=PAvpK2DENB0#t=553

http://vimeo.com/87401740

I wish I spoke German.

loved the stories about the house.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/arts/music/reviving-the-ghostly-sounds-of-maryanne-amacher.html?_r=0

that Charles Atlas documentation of the Merce piece from 1977 maybe the earliest composition to prompt otoacoustic emissions? you can hear the same materials appear in 'Living Sound Patent Pending' and the 1982 Music Gallery concert

sadly this piece makes no mention of the recent live concert exhibition of her work last year by Recombinant Media Labs at Gray Area. Reviews were mixed (I was out of town, but I think GA were still trying to tame the natural reverb of their room) but that 12 channel recording of her entire 2000 concert at the Compound has got to be the primary document of what she did in concert that she never even attempted to do on CD. at least I hope so; that night will always be in my top 5 concert experiences list

I still don't understand the Tzadik CD, any suggestions for optimizing a listening environment there?

never really listen to it either, I usually just play this: https://soundcloud.com/artpractical/maryanne-amacher-clip-for

though programming just track 3 playing it at 100 dB + on a good system in a large room might come close

my favorite is the first part of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MahrtRVhkA

https://academic.oup.com/oq/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oq/kbx025/4734984?guestAccessKey=8095c75d-c8dd-4370-b419-cf66ff4224fa

in case that link goes dead one of these years

An idiosyncratic three-part storyboard drops us into the middle of Maryanne Amacher’s media opera Intelligent Life (1981–1982) (see figure 1). Readied for submission to directors and funders throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, the opera consisted of nine one-hour-long episodes designed for television broadcast with in-home FM simulcast. As of yet, it has not been taped, recorded, or broadcast. Rather, it persists as five short texts, totaling 150 pages in length, with Amacher’s surprising membership in the Professional Screenwriters of America foregrounded on the cover page.1 A “Premise” and “Background to the Story’s Intrigue” introduce the opera’s fictive milieu. The year is 2021—the bicentennial of Hermann von Helmholtz’s birth—and the plot concerns Supreme Connections LLC, a music research and entertainment company, following the workaday lives, research practices, and aspirations of its leading figures. In a “Partial Treatment and Material for Pilot Story,” Amacher’s characters narrate how Supreme Connections came into being. Forged amid the failure of algorithmic music recommendation services and a second-generation artificial intelligence that could compose in nearly any historical idiom,2 the company proposed an alternative world of public media interactivity: “smart” technologies for the car and the home, enchanted architectures of customizable audio, and multisensory designs for a burgeoning “urban informatics” that re-cast the city as a kind of theme park that could respond to passersby with all sorts of original but also highly situated forms of sounding.3 Though its technologies are fictive, Supreme Connections’ story makes a clear reference to concerns that long structured Amacher’s own work.

On the heels of a technophilic 1960s U.S. experimentalism eager to claim the sounds of living bodies—eartones, heartbeats, brainwaves, and other close mic’ed oddities—as raw material newly “discovered” and then submitted to composers for aesthetic refinement and technological elaboration, Intelligent Life shows how any “newly sonorous” biomechanical processes come already carved and compacted by technology, capital, and politics.15

can you believe it? and sounds like there's enough there that it could be staged credibly as hers -- the archives contain digital tapes of many of the separate tapes she'd use to mix a concert, and there are a few collaborators familiar enough with her performance techniques. though like Ives' Universe Symphony it's going to require some imaginative intermediaries.

Is it available on spotify?

dull sincere response: sounds like someone (person or institution) should apply for funding to produce this. Opera America has special grants for producing/developing work by female composers (along with other grant programs).

After having read more thoroughly: producing this sounds like an awesome project. Invariably it will be done in Europe or somewhere with more resources than the Bay Area.

Excellent:

https://www.artforum.com/news/archive-of-sound-art-pioneer-maryanne-amacher-goes-to-the-new-york-public-library-82200?fbclid=IwAR3t4RdykwGDncILcuZoIc4FRpvITUoZ2l6KmcVMXy1C8s4odBE9959J70k

So where online do you people go to chat about that new interview book?

https://vimeo.com/513113108/56af20437a