About

Amy Cimini is an Associate Professor of Music at UC San Diego in the Integrative Studies Area. Her work as a musicologist, teacher, and musician addresses themes of power, community, and technology in 20th and 21st-century experimental music, sound art, and auditory culture. Her research methods combine archival research, oral history, experimental writing, and performance, focusing on how musical performance and technological mediation influence collective knowledge and practice. She investigates ideologies of value and community shaping sound and listening practices in U.S. auditory culture after 1945, with particular attention to understudied or marginalized figures and analytics of gender, race, and class. Her theoretical work explores expanding concepts of body, life, and materiality in music studies to register difference and power in analysis and historical narration. Her scholarly work includes a focus on the composer Maryanne Amacher, whose listening practices, gender, and histories of US technoscience have guided her inquiries. Her book, 'Wild Sound: Maryanne Amacher and the Tenses of Audible Life,' engages with Amacher's multidisciplinary approach to auditory experience and speculative media, examining how sound conceptualizations attach social value to bodies, materials, and relations, with relevance to civic, environmental, telecommunications, and science and technology issues in late 20th-century U.S. Cimini has also co-edited a collection of Amacher's writings and engages with her legacy through public presentation, performance, and exhibition. Her background includes performance as a violist and musical collaboration, which informs her interest in how people and relations are valued in music-making and circulation. She teaches courses on music history, culture, film, media, and research methods, emphasizing analysis of power and the demystification of knowledge production and hierarchies. Cimini holds a Ph.D. in historical musicology from New York University and B.A. in English and B.M. in Viola Performance from Oberlin College and Conservatory.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Philosophy
• Physics
• Acoustics
• History

Selected publications

• Eartones and Third Ears

  2022-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines how Amacher studied auditory processing in order to compose differential interchanges between responsivities along the auditory pathway and inside a listener’s body. These interchanges she called “perceptual geography.” Through the autodidactic research program documented in her Additional Tones Workbook IV (1976/rev. 1987), this chapter identifies a dramatic epistemic charge in psychoacoustic and otological discourses on response tones in the cochlea (or “eartones”) and considers how Amacher extrapolated their scientific, historical and social meanings. Complementing analyses of her 1999 album Sound Characters (making the third ear), this chapter takes up the third ear, following philosopher Sarah Kofman, within a broader history of listening that registers and challenges distributions of life and sensation across a body. As an analytic of difference and power, the third ear emphasizes critical edges, in Amacher’s approach to eartones, that proved central to how she developed their dramatic and diegetic horizons in subsequent work.

  PublisherDOI

• Wild Sound

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Acoustics
  • Physics

  Abstract “We haven’t even made it to breakfast!” Composer Maryanne Amacher (1938–2009) often used this phrase to marvel at critical and partial approaches to knowledge production across the vast artistic, technical, and scientific discourses with which she worked. Her musical thought encompassed original presentational formats in existing and speculative media as well as approaches to sound and ways of listening that conjoined real and imagined social worlds. In these conjunctions, this book discerns meeting points between frameworks for life that emerged from Amacher’s multidisciplinary study of sound and listening: within acoustical spectra, inside human bodies and ears, across cities and edgleands, amid hypothetical creatures, and between virtual, fictive, or distanciated environments. These figurations guide interpretative study of six signal projects: Adjacencies (1965/1966); City-Links (1967–1988); Additional Tones (1976/1987); Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980–2009); Mini Sound Series (1985–2009); and Intelligent Life (1980s), and countless sketches, notes, and unrealized projects. The book explores Amacher’s working methods with an interpretive style that emphasizes technical study, conceptual juxtaposition, intertextual play, and narrative transport. This book also takes up Amacher’s work as a guiding thread across shifting social discourses on life in the late twentieth-century United States. Her projects convoked figurations of life and technoscience that could be partially and ironically accessed or conceptualized via complex auditory thresholds. This nascent epistemology rooted in feminist science and technology studies centers biopolitical questions about difference and power in artistic and critical work that counts Amacher among its precedents.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>La Memoria es un Pájaro</i>, or multimedia poetry in the drift

  Sound Studies · 2022-11-28

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay meditates on multimedia and sound artist Pablo Francisco Morales’s solo exhibition La Memoria es un Pájaro at the Instituto Municipal de Arte y Cultura (IMAC) in Tijuana during early summer 2022. Morales’ work opens the social and psychic experience of mourning through mediatic dispersal across audio, video, photography, dramatising how mourning’s demands on signification unsettle material and perceptual reality. The exhibition also invites a hemispheric and regional approach to sound art rooted in the borderlands, which links Morales’ decidedly semiotic and transmedial conception of sound art to broader questions about social and political genealogies for its theory and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• Amacher’s House for Strange Life

  2022-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter examines how Amacher developed diegetic involvements, in her Music for Sound-Joined Rooms (1980) and Mini Sound Series (1985), that redoubled participants’ listening within fictive narrative structures that entangle acoustical and speculative conditions of audibility. To do so, it illuminates what Amacher called structure-borne sound, which created three-dimensional sonic shapes to guide listeners through a clue-filled architectural setting. Her 1980 Living Sound (Patent Pending)—a reference to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that granted patents to laboratory-created life forms—paired social discourses on microorganismal life with interaural perceptual geographies in a fictional laboratory environment. Though its structure-borne sound cannot be reconstructed, this chapter embraces Living Sound’s fictive world with abandon and rigor, unpacking its clues and set pieces in order to discern ambivalent articulations of life and a critical address to high-tech environments that Amacher expressed, in a different way, in the unrealized media opera Intelligent Life.

  PublisherDOI

• Scenes from a Long Distance Music, 1970–1976Long Distance Music, 1970

  2022-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter explores long distance music and multi-sited listening in writings, text pieces, tape pieces, recording sessions, and City-Links projects that Amacher created between 1970 and 1976. In performances, installations, and research-based contexts, Amacher attuned distinct and often speculative embodiments to distanciated listening that combined remote transmission, environmental sound, and auditory dimension. This chapter discusses infrastructural and perceptual approaches to environmental remediation and civic value that Amacher encountered at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, amid social, political and economic contestation about urban interzones and waterfronts. City-Links’ entanglements with industrial telecommunications also linked its technological supports to changed working conditions for telephone operators via automation in early computational environments. While the chapter concludes with No More Miles—An Acoustic Twin (1974), an exemplar of City-Links proto-diegetic dynamics, it imagines long distance music as an alternative tele-technological network that captured cycles of change and obsolescence in its historical moment.

  PublisherDOI

• Afterword: Notes with Ears

  2022-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In order to dramatize the futures one might imagine for a music so deeply concerned with a listener’s embodied standpoint, the book concludes by imagining Amacher in the role of her fictive character—Intelligent Life’s Aplisa Kandel. This gesture addresses questions of social content and resistance that have long been central to feminist musicology to an emerging sound art discourse—that often claims Amacher as an originary figure—struggling to extend its interpretive horizons toward the social, the cultural, and the political. With this, one can meditate on how much, about Amacher, remains speculative and open-ended.

  PublisherDOI

• “I Want to Make a Music . . .”

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • History

  Abstract Who was Maryanne Amacher? In episodes that span the years 1965–1990, this chapter introduces Amacher in relation to feminist science and technology studies (through her working notes), realized and unrealized projects in broadcast, architectural staging, and dramatic formats (through her writings, scores, project notes), as well as personal and artistic aspirations (in her letters). This survey emphasizes speculation, deferred or distributed audibility, and ongoing drama within auditory sensitivities as organizational logics across Amacher’s work. The chapter builds on these logics to orient listening toward expressions of social tense and mood. By denaturalizing the structuring conditions under which sounds can be heard together, Amacher’s work prompts questions about how sound and listening are co-materialized across disparate social locations in a shared present or uncertain future. Attention to these transits can reveal a situated politics of life in the late twentieth-century United States and intersects a music and sound studies with whom Amacher shares interlocutors in feminist science studies and epistemology.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Adjacencies</i> and Its Negations

  2022-03-17

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract “How can worlds of sound be joined?” While Amacher developed this question in realized and unrealized concert music during the mid-1960s, it also conjoined spectral and spatial ways of listening in her inaugural broadcast and environmental projects, City-Links WBFO, Buffalo, and In City, Buffalo 1967 on much different historical and material terrain. A close look at conceptual and notational strategies in Amacher’s electroacoustic percussion work Adjacencies illuminates her musical thought at an early stage and reveals how spectral listening could function as meeting place within which sound and ongoing life exchange intensities elsewhere. Critical comparisons with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I (1964) and Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 9 for Amplified Shoveller Quartet (1969) elaborate how musical forms and experiences amid resonant metals, dramaturgy, and promissory grammar can work in concert or in conflict with historical spaces of biopolitics. Following Adjacencies’ archival traces across the radio broadcast City-Links and festival-like In City moves its connective ways of listening into concrete changes amid so-called redevelopment in urban history and policy debates, entwining social histories and media aesthetics that will inform Amacher’s long-distance projects in the decade to follow.

  PublisherDOI

• We don’t know that we don’t know what a body can do … , or Spinoza and some social lives of sonic material

  Intellectual History Review · 2020 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Security

  This essay is about how artists, listeners and critics claim to hear life in a sound and how this suggestive, but hazily defined, provocation connects vast cultural circuits of production, technology and capital. I argue that claims to life in a sound also belie an anachronistic return to an early modern understanding of sound as particulate matter and suggest a technoscientific discourse in which sound and data are described in terms of one another. With a close engagement with microsounds – from Gilles Deleuze to computer music specialist Curtis Roads – this essay queries what sonic particulates are presumed to be when they are mapped onto Spinoza’s corpora simplicissima but processed through analogy synthesis or digital tools. In part, this essay tries to speak to a persistent separation of sonic materiality and auditory culture, in music and sound studies in which life in a sound cannot be thought apart from how life is subject to different kinds of extractions. With a return to Spinoza’s physics, this essay also retakes the often sloganized “no one knows what a body can do” to emphasize an ethical recomposition of the text in which to “know” must be as open-ended as “body” is typically emphasized to be.

  PublisherDOI

• Music Theory, Feminism, the Body: Mediation’s Plural Work

  Contemporary Music Review · 2018-11-02 · 6 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This essay returns to early 1990s work on feminist music theory to query the concepts of mediation that underlie it. Efforts to bring music analysis closer to performance drag the historicity of the body along with them. They need to show how bodies are always already mediated, and to include a concern for the mutual mediation of body and social processes; not just the microsocialities of performance but also translocal formations of gender, race and class as they get into performance, conservatory and university music departments, and other music professions. By retrieving notions of the body developed by feminist epistemology and cultural studies of science, this essay suggests that a feminist music theory might be less a music theory than a much further-reaching theory of musical mediation. This means including epistemic standpoints that we might not recognise first as properly musical, instead prioritising their power-differentiation via distinctions between creative work and reproductive labour.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jairo Moreno

  1 shared

Labs

• Music Department at UC San DiegoPI