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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
Hearing
Listening

More quotes by Pauline Oliveros

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[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
Pauline Oliveros
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Deep Listening Institute is dissolving and is now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The legacy of the twenty or thirty years that we've been operating is now transferred to RPI.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.
Pauline Oliveros
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I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.
Pauline Oliveros
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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.
Pauline Oliveros
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It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points.
Pauline Oliveros
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When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
Pauline Oliveros
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I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
Pauline Oliveros
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I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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It's going to take about a year or two for the transfer to be completed. We have a certification program so professionals can teach deep listening.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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[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.
Pauline Oliveros
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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
Pauline Oliveros
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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.
Pauline Oliveros
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Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
Pauline Oliveros
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When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
Pauline Oliveros