[3] She was invited while doing a fellowship at the Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by John Cage to work on several projects.

[4] Amacher worked extensively with a set of psychoacoustic phenomena known as 'auditory distortion products';[5] put simply: sounds generated inside the ear that are clearly audible to the hearer.

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'.

She describes the subjective experience of these phenomena in the following passage: When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head ... (my audiences) discover they are producing a tonal dimension of the music which interacts melodically, rhythmically, and spatially with the tones in the room.

I want to release this music which is produced by the listener ...[8]Over the years she received several major commissions in the United States and Europe with occasional work in Asia and Central and South America.

In 2005, she was awarded the Prix Ars Electronica (the Golden Nica) in the "Digital Musics" category for her project "TEO!

[9] At the time of her death she had been working three years on a 40-channel piece commissioned by the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York.

[citation needed] Maryanne Amacher has been an important influence for composers such as Rhys Chatham and Thurston Moore.