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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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Pauline Oliveros
Age: 84 †
Born: 1932
Born: May 30
Died: 2016
Died: November 24
Accordionist
Composer
Music Theorist
Musician
University Teacher
Houston
Texas
Something
Sonic
Would
Ensemble
Improved
Observe
Incredibly
Meditation
Students
Ensembles
Knew
Meditations

More quotes by Pauline Oliveros

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Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
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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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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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.
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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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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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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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I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.
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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Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
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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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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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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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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When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
Pauline Oliveros
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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! .
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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[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.
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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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