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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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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Direction
Meditation
Attention
Firsts
First
Sonic
Composing
Composed
Realized

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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 .
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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
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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.
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My writing has always been a rather non-linear process. I've found if I get something down, I can listen to it and other things start to come.
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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.
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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.
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We have a very large constituency in the world from all of the years that we've done workshops, retreats, and talks. I would say there a few thousand people out there that have some relationship to what we do.
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I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
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I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
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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.
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[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
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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.
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Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
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The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].
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