456 pages (illustrated). A visionary document from one of the most radical minds in American experimental music finally sees the light. Blank Forms Editions presents the first comprehensive publication of Maryanne Amacher's unproduced magnum opus Intelligent Life - a media opera that, had fate not intervened, would have represented the culmination of the composer's groundbreaking work on perception, listening, and the very nature of sonic experience.

The story behind this book is as extraordinary as its contents. In 1983, Amacher was on the verge of realizing her most ambitious project to date, with the backing of Wies Smals, founder of Amsterdam's De Appel, and curator Josine van Droffelaar. Then tragedy struck: both patrons died in a plane crash in the Swiss Alps. As Amacher wrote to John Cage shortly after, she had finally found collaborators who could help her "communicate the finest of my thought to others." That opportunity would never return - yet Amacher continued developing Intelligent Life for much of her remaining career, leaving behind an astonishing archive of treatments, scripts, and storyboards.

What emerges from these pages is nothing short of prophetic. Set in the year 2021, Intelligent Life follows the employees of Supreme Connections LLC, a music entertainment corporation grappling with a future where artificial intelligence generates music faster than human composers can. Sound familiar? Amacher was mapping our present anxieties four decades before they arrived. But this is no dystopian hand-wringing. The opera's president, Aplisa Kandel, pursues technologies that could revolutionize listening itself: a bio-music script allowing users to hear Bach from the aural perspective of a reindeer; wearable devices that reproduce not merely the mechanical resonances of the ear but the "listening mind" - capturing the emotional and psychological associations unique to each individual.

This is Amacher at her most ambitious and speculative, pushing beyond her celebrated installations toward a form that could reach the broadest possible audience. Conceived for serialized radio broadcast and television simulcast, Intelligent Life sought to shift music away from what she dismissively called "nod and tap recognition" toward something genuinely transformative - awakening listeners to "unrecognized and new perceptual modes."

This volume presents the most complete working documents from Amacher's archive: episodic scripts, technical notes on LaserDisc implementation, and a remarkable illustrated storyboard for the pilot episode. For anyone who has encountered Amacher's work - her legendary installations, her pioneering experiments with "Music for Sound-Joined Rooms," her explorations of otoacoustic emissions and "third ear music" - this book opens a window onto the project she considered her most important.

Maryanne Amacher (1938-2009) remains one of the most singular figures in the history of experimental sound. Her large-scale installations and radical investigations into aural architecture, perception, and creative intelligence anticipated developments in network culture, media arts, and acoustic ecology that are only now being fully understood. Often positioned within a post-Cagean lineage, her work consistently exceeded and challenged the assumptions of any genre that tried to contain it - including the very notion of "sound art" she helped pioneer.

Essential reading for anyone interested in the future of listening, a future Amacher was already inhabiting decades ago.