Maryanne Amacher did not simply compose sounds for rooms.
She wanted the rooms themselves to behave acoustically.
In her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms installations, she worked with sound transmitted through architectural structures, using walls, floors, corridors and connected spaces to shape what listeners heard and physically felt.
Her own description is wonderful: rooms, walls and corridors that sing.
That idea changes the normal relationship between music and architecture.
Usually we build a composition somewhere else, bring loudspeakers into a room and then try to minimise whatever the architecture does to the mix.
Amacher did almost the reverse.
The building became part of the signal chain.
Earlier, beginning with City-Links in 1967, she had already experimented with microphones transmitting remote environments over telephone lines, effectively connecting distant places into one listening system.
Decades before networked performances became easy, she was treating telecommunications infrastructure as musical material.
What stays with me is the scale of her thinking.
The instrument could be a room.
Or several rooms.
Or a city connected to another city.
Electronic music is often imagined as something generated inside machines.
Amacher kept asking what would happen if the machine was only one component inside a much larger acoustic system that included architecture, distance and the listener’s own ears.
https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/maryanne-amacher/
