Pauline Oliveros
Deep Listening is listening to everything all the time, and reminding yourself when you're not. But going below the surface too, it's an active process. It's not passive. I mean hearing is passive in that soundwaves hinge upon the eardrum. You can do both. You can focus and be receptive to your surroundings. If you're tuned out, then you're not in contact with your surroundings. You have to process what you hear. Hearing and listening are not the same thing.Collection: Music
Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become earsCollection: Feet
Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.Collection: Decision
Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listeningCollection: Listening
I am also interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.Collection: Mean
Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep ListeningCollection: Musical
Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.Collection: Listening
People's experiences are all different, and you don't know what the person experienced. They know, but you don't, so I think it's important to listen carefully to what a person has to say. And not to force them into any direction at all but simply to model what you've experienced, model it and also be what I call a Listening Presence. If you're really listening, then some of the barriers can dissolve or change.Collection: Thinking
Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.Collection: Silence
I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.Collection: Player
Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.Collection: Way
When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.Collection: Meditation
When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.Collection: Sound
I feel that students always learn more from each other than they do from their professor. They learn by doing and not by trying to soak up information from one person.Collection: Trying
I'm very interested in vertical space.I want the players to listen to their sound in such a way that they hear the complete sound they make before they make another one. So that means that they hear the tail of the sound. Because of the reverberation, there's always more to the sound than just the sound.Collection: Mean
We think about sitting in a space and hearing some music by having our ears pointed forward towards the musicians sitting opposite us. I'm really not following that paradigm at all.Collection: Thinking
The base skill is listening: how I'm listening to the material, how I'm listening to the space. With electronic sound, it's a similar situation of how to produce it and place it so that it works in a space. The first consideration is adopting the space and having work that resonates in the space.Collection: Skills
Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.Collection: Beautiful
I became interested in the delay, having sounds recorded and played back and then come back. I did many different configurations of sending signals from one track back to another track, or to the same track, or crisscrossing them and so forth. I worked on masking the delays so when I played into the machine, I would make long tones and collect sounds in such a way that you didn't hear the delay, although sometimes you did.Collection: Long
You run into stereotypes so that the stereotype filters who you are and what you do, and having to deal with that was the most frustrating thing for me.Collection: Running
There is a book called San Francisco Tape Music Centre:1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and this book describes everything that you want to know or don't want to know about it, with a lot of documentation.Collection: Book
I would play a long tone on my accordion, or I'd sing one, and I would note how it felt - what it did with my mental space. These were meditations that I did.Collection: Play
I try to influence this improvisation in two ways. One is by centering on reflections, in both senses of the word: acoustic reflections as well as visual reflections from a mirror or surface, and then reflecting on the material in a contemplative way. The other influence is listening to the tails of the sounds that you make.Collection: Reflection
It takes time because the habitual response to that is very deep. It goes back to our earliest responses as babies. You have to feel safe, and if a sound is threatening, you're going to be upset. There are those early responses, depending on how and what kind of experiences you had.Collection: Baby
I think the worst thing is stereotyping.Collection: Thinking
I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.Collection: Attitude
I have a variety of ways that I make music, but I'm working with the Thingamajigs in a particular way, which is: They are bringing to me their performance skills and their unusual instruments, which I'm relishing. They're really beautiful. The other thing is improvisation - these players improvise and they do it very beautifully, as a matter of fact.Collection: Beautiful
When we had the San Francisco Tape Music Center, we had a couple of Ampex tape machines there, and I could string tape from one machine, past the heads, and over to the next machine to the supply-reel amp, and have another delay there.Collection: Couple
In the beginning we were making tape music, meaning, we were making music on tape.Collection: Tape
My mother brought home the accordion in 1942. I was fascinated and wanted to learn to play it. Some of my music has a relationship to dance styles - The Well and the Gentle or The Wanderer for example.Collection: Mother
In my Deep Listening class at RPI, I always do an hour of energy exercises to start with. Then we do a listening meditation after that, after the body has been loosened up and warmed up and is ready. We do the listening. After that, there's the journaling of the experience, which they do each time throughout the semester to the point that I have them write a final paper on what they've experienced.Collection: Writing
The mission [of institution] won't change. It will continue to be what it is: to spread the practice of deep listening and introduce it to people, to do workshops and retreats and certification programs and so on.Collection: Practice
There are these sounds that come from outside that work really well if you're listening. If you're not listening, if you're blocking them out, then you don't get it. You don't get the merger of what the players are doing with everything, listening to everything.Collection: Block
Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.Collection: Ideas
That was at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in about 1989. There were 6,000 women there, and they were out in a meadow, and I offered the tuning meditation and they did it.Collection: Meditation
Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.Collection: Years
After a long section of the glass playing, you'll hear an instrumental sound emerge from some undisclosed location. There'll be a lot of mystery about the sound, I think.Collection: Thinking
Those people who don't have any voluntary control, or hands, can work with the physical movement that they can do - whatever voluntary movement they have, even the slightest .Collection: Hands
I wrote my sonic meditations and started using them with students. I took a bunch of UCSD students out to Joshua Tree and we did the sonic meditations on the boulders.Collection: Meditation
One day I decided I would like to put a record into my system. So I picked up a record that was lying on the table, and put it on. I didn't bother to look at what it was because I didn't care, and it turned out to be Madame Butterfly. So I processed the aria from Madame Butterfly in my system and I played with it.Collection: Lying
I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton.Collection: Artist
Now, I have about twenty per hand and can change the number of delays, change different parameters, the delays to the modulations and so forth. I developed the EIS over the time period that I was just talking about [1991].Collection: Talking
I can't really deal with buttons. And that's what I keep saying, "Okay, I can't push buttons, because that means I have to take my hands off the keyboard or the buttons or whatever. Don't you understand!" .Collection: Mean
You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.Collection: Play
The sound that I play is delayed, it's modified, and it's modulated. It's an intelligent system; it's happening now.Collection: Intelligent
I'll just say that I made my own explorations of tone by listening to a tone for a long time until I began to understand what my sensations were, what my mind was doing with tone.Collection: Long
My first tape piece was made with that Sears Roebuck recorder. I modified sound using cardboard tubes with a microphone in the end to filter the sound. I had a wooden apple box with a Piezo [contact] mic and little objects that I could amplify on the box. I used the bathtub for reverberation.Collection: Apples
I think that this performance with the Thingamajigs is going to be an exploration of the acoustic space and particularly the vertical space, which we don't think about so much.Collection: Thinking
I didn't have any sophisticated equipment at all. The equipment we had in the studio at the time was not intended to make music; it was for testing purposes. So we had to repurpose all the equipment to make music. That made me try a lot of different things.Collection: Trying
[Students] they did the sonic meditations, I would observe them in their ensembles, and the ensembles improved incredibly. So I knew I had something to do and something to say.Collection: Meditation