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Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
Pauline Oliveros
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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Listening
Hearing
More quotes by Pauline Oliveros
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.
Pauline Oliveros
Something that I did, and I developed out of that sonic meditations, which were pieces that I composed in the '70s that now are very well-known and used in many classrooms all over the world, but at the time were outrageous.
Pauline Oliveros
I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
Pauline Oliveros
I thought that it would be interesting to have a mirror and grab a light and shine it around in different ways. It's an analog to the acoustic reflections that we're going to be trying to activate as well.
Pauline Oliveros
Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
Pauline Oliveros
A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.
Pauline Oliveros
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.
Pauline Oliveros
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.
Pauline Oliveros
I had a lot of good times. I had a lot of fun. I liked what I was doing, so I just kept doing it. At the Tape Music Center, I was working from midnight to four in the morning. Because then it was quiet, nobody was there, and I could just do my work. I didn't have to fool around.
Pauline Oliveros
It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points.
Pauline Oliveros
[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
Pauline Oliveros
When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
Pauline Oliveros
My mother brought accordion home. She was going to learn to play it so she could teach it and increase her income. And I got fascinated with it, so she backed off and let me do it.
Pauline Oliveros
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.
Pauline Oliveros
The students were missing out a lot in their ensemble playing because they weren't listening to each other or the environment.
Pauline Oliveros
Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.
Pauline Oliveros
When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
Pauline Oliveros
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.
Pauline Oliveros
Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.
Pauline Oliveros
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 .
Pauline Oliveros
