In Memory of Maryanne Amacher
via BT
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Those endless moments of nothing except the distant low rumble of the city, then in the midground or foreground a single ship horn, nothing to write home about except it came out of nowhere like a beautiful gift from a stranger; a couple of startled gulls, then lots more nothing; minutes later, in the distance a tug leading a big ocean ship into the port, then the ships talking to each other with their horns, the tug mid-range 300 Hertz, tight and trombone-farty, the big ship broad, deep 78 Hertz and maestoso. They start off in the distance and over a period of 10 minutes or so move right under Maryanne’s hidden Neumann microphones, a natural crescendo of intermittent phased pulses that even in their enormous slowness became instant music.
But it wasn’t only the narrative sonic-drama that Maryanne was after; she wanted to get inside the “hum” — the big hum that every urban and industrial location emits from its own natural circulatory system. The hum that underpins all the mid- and foreground sound of life, the hum of all vibrating substance that holds our damned planet on keel. (She’s inspired me to seek it too, from the Gianicolo Hill, recording Rome in the dead of night.) Maryanne knew that inside that macro envelope of noise is the All: nascent melodies, harmonies, beats and rhythms, starlike in their birth.
During that short visit Maryanne wanted me to hear a new work-in-progress that she was composing on tape. I sat dead-center between her two finely (obsessively) placed loudspeakers which she lamented were a disappointment; she hesitated, then started the tape. Pulsing sounds emerged from what seemed like every direction, began to circle my head, I thought I was hallucinating swarms of biological air, Maryanne was standing there looking at me with a knowing smile on her face. I said, “But how do you get the sound to circle my head, to move in back of me as well as in front of me?” She said, coyly, something like, “Well, I really don’t know but I am working on it.” Then we both broke up as if we were stoned.
On the train back to Providence, these magical sounds were still circling my head like a whirling wreath of pure outer space. Our common passion for natural sound made us friends for life but our musical natures (me the fool, she the self-made research fellow) kept us from competing in any way. Maryanne was of course in a class by herself — yet, while hermetic by nature, she was always ready to share her deep interests in the science of the brain, hearing, acoustics, biology and inexplicable mystical phenomena with anyone genuinely interested.
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via BT
- bill 12-29-2009 1:47 pm
[...]
Those endless moments of nothing except the distant low rumble of the city, then in the midground or foreground a single ship horn, nothing to write home about except it came out of nowhere like a beautiful gift from a stranger; a couple of startled gulls, then lots more nothing; minutes later, in the distance a tug leading a big ocean ship into the port, then the ships talking to each other with their horns, the tug mid-range 300 Hertz, tight and trombone-farty, the big ship broad, deep 78 Hertz and maestoso. They start off in the distance and over a period of 10 minutes or so move right under Maryanne’s hidden Neumann microphones, a natural crescendo of intermittent phased pulses that even in their enormous slowness became instant music.
But it wasn’t only the narrative sonic-drama that Maryanne was after; she wanted to get inside the “hum” — the big hum that every urban and industrial location emits from its own natural circulatory system. The hum that underpins all the mid- and foreground sound of life, the hum of all vibrating substance that holds our damned planet on keel. (She’s inspired me to seek it too, from the Gianicolo Hill, recording Rome in the dead of night.) Maryanne knew that inside that macro envelope of noise is the All: nascent melodies, harmonies, beats and rhythms, starlike in their birth.
During that short visit Maryanne wanted me to hear a new work-in-progress that she was composing on tape. I sat dead-center between her two finely (obsessively) placed loudspeakers which she lamented were a disappointment; she hesitated, then started the tape. Pulsing sounds emerged from what seemed like every direction, began to circle my head, I thought I was hallucinating swarms of biological air, Maryanne was standing there looking at me with a knowing smile on her face. I said, “But how do you get the sound to circle my head, to move in back of me as well as in front of me?” She said, coyly, something like, “Well, I really don’t know but I am working on it.” Then we both broke up as if we were stoned.
On the train back to Providence, these magical sounds were still circling my head like a whirling wreath of pure outer space. Our common passion for natural sound made us friends for life but our musical natures (me the fool, she the self-made research fellow) kept us from competing in any way. Maryanne was of course in a class by herself — yet, while hermetic by nature, she was always ready to share her deep interests in the science of the brain, hearing, acoustics, biology and inexplicable mystical phenomena with anyone genuinely interested.
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- bill 12-29-2009 1:50 pm [add a comment]