Amma Ateria is an electroacoustic composer and sound artist, born in Hong Kong, working in San Francisco and New York City. Her work explores themes in coexistence of polarity, psychoacoustics in binaural beats, and equal-loudness contour. With immediacy of tension / release, she navigates between oppositions, transforming deafening noise into meditative stance. Through cross-modal synesthetic influences from the contemporary moment, notions of externalizing resonances act in forms of questioning boundaries via the sonic spectrum.
Her compositions, developed during concussion recovery utilizes brainwave entrainment, time shifts, and changes of neurological responses to DELTA, THETA, ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA waves as materials and focal point. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, polyrhythmic occurrences, out-of-body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and distorted speech.
She studied with Maggi Payne and Fred Frith; Performed with Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Tarek Atoui, Paul Clipson, Zeena Parkins, Erik Friedlander, Brian Chase, Nava Dunkelman, Matmos, Pauchi Sasaki, John Zorn, Julie Tolentino, Stephanie Mei Huang, Kim Ip, and others; Performed as opening support for Franck Vigroux, Tim Hecker, Maggi Payne, and Carl Stone.
Since her studies at Mills College in music composition with specialization in electronic music, audio engineering, and media technology, her work has been presented in installation, performances, and artist-in-residence at SoART (2013 Austria), Titanik Gallery (2014 Finland), The Stone (2016 NYC), BAMPFA (2017 Berkeley), Exploratorium (2018 San Francisco), Marfa Sounding: Tarek Atoui (2018 Marfa), CCRMA @ Stanford University (2018), Cinematheque @ YBCA (2019),…
