Maryanne Amacher

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. Biography Amacher was born in Kane, Pennsylvania, Amacher worked extensively with a set of psychoacoustic phenomena known as ‘auditory distortion products’; put simply: sounds generated inside the ear that are clearly audible to the hearer. These tones have a long history in music theory and scientific research, and are still the object of disagreement and debate. In music, they are most commonly known by the name of ‘combination tones’, ‘difference tones’, and sometimes ‘Tartini tones’ (after the violinist Giuseppe Tartini, who is credited with discovering them). Amacher herself termed them ’ear tones’ until 1992, when she discovered the work of David T. Kemp and Thomas Gold and began referring to them by the psychoacoustical terminology of ‘otoacoustic emissions’. It has since become clear that some of the sounds Amacher, and indeed