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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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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Deep
Listening
Heightened
Silence
Expanded
Sound
Sounding
Making
Experiencing
Sounds
Awareness
Quiet

More quotes by Pauline Oliveros

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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
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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.
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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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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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
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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Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
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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Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
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
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In the '60s my friends were interested and we were hearing electronic music coming in on community radio from Europe, so that's where it started. And I had a tape recorder and started making things with it.
Pauline Oliveros
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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.
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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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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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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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.
Pauline Oliveros
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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.
Pauline Oliveros
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The students were missing out a lot in their ensemble playing because they weren't listening to each other or the environment.
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