Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sound art, electroacoustic music
Website: ammaateria.com
Amma Ateria is an electroacoustic composer and sound artist born in Hong Kong who now lives and works between San Francisco and New York City. She studied music composition at Mills College in Oakland, specializing in electronic music, audio engineering, and media technology, and trained with composers Maggi Payne and Fred Frith. Her artist name is drawn from “flammable material,” reflecting a practice built on giving strength to disintegration and fragility and on rebuilding from the aftermath of collapse.
Much of Ateria’s recent body of work grew out of her recovery from a concussion sustained in June 2021. Rather than set the experience aside, she turned it into compositional material, using brainwave entrainment, binaural beats, and shifting neurological responses across delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma wave states as the raw structure of her music. This research produced the album CONCUSSSSION I, developed in part during a 2022 music residency at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, and the ongoing multi-part work The Entropic Arias.
Ateria has performed and collaborated with figures including Ikue Mori, Pauline Oliveros, Tarek Atoui, Zeena Parkins, Erik Friedlander, Brian Chase, Matmos, and John Zorn, and has opened for Tim Hecker, Maggi Payne, and Lucy Railton. Her work has been supported by an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and presented at venues and festivals across the Bay Area, the East Coast, and Europe, including BAMPFA, CCRMA at Stanford, the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, INA GRM’s PRÉSENCES électronique in Paris, and the MA/IN Festival in Italy.
Ateria’s compositions sit at the intersection of electroacoustic music and psychoacoustic research. She works with equal-loudness contours, sub-bass and infrasonic frequencies, and binaural beats to induce specific perceptual and neurological states in listeners, treating the physiology of hearing itself as a compositional material. Recurring sound sources include close-range airplane frequencies, polyrhythmic patterns, sustained harmonics, musique concrète textures, and processed or distorted speech.
Her larger projects, such as The Entropic Arias, extend into audiovisual territory, pairing dense fields of sonic fragments with generative visual systems (in one iteration, a field of 40,000 particles) to stage a passage between collapse and emergence, dissonance and harmony. The work is explicitly framed around entropy and neurogenesis — using the disorientation of concussion recovery, auditory hallucination, and altered brain states as thresholds toward clarity rather than purely as subject matter to depict.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.