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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
Meditation
Attention
Firsts
First
Sonic
Composing
Composed
Realized
Direction

More quotes by 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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Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.
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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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A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.
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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! .
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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.
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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.
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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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I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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 sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].
Pauline Oliveros
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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
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I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.
Pauline Oliveros