Intelligent Life

The most comprehensive compilation of the sound artist's working documents for her unrealized media-opera tour de forceWritten in the early 1980s by American sound art pioneer Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009), Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections LLC, a music entertainment corporation navigating a future in which artificial intelligence generates music faster than composers can. Anticipating an industry-wide downturn, Supreme Connections president Aplisa Kandel seeks advanced technologies that will revolutionize the act of listening, narrating to the audience as she does so. Though the untimely deaths of the opera's would-be patrons prevented Amacher from realizing the work in its intended forms--a serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast--she continued designing "treatments" for the opera for much of her career.This publication makes the most complete presentation of these working documents--including episodic scripts, notes on the use of LaserDisc and an illustrated storyboard for the pilot--available to the public for the first time, and evinces Amacher's prescient ideas about perception, listening and composition.