Striving To Revive The Ghostly Sounds Of Electronic Music Composer Maryanne Amacher

The composer created experiences that are hard to recreate: “A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen and a collaborator with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, Amacher had some of her greatest successes with huge sound-design installations tailored for specific spaces. These ‘linked room’ works exploited psychoacoustic effects that she pioneered: A foyer might hit the spectator with high-pitched tones meant to excite strange inner-ear responses. An adjoining space could feature quiet, slowly fading bass frequencies, lingering at the edge of auditory perception.”