Top 80 Quotes & Sayings by Pauline Oliveros

A mouse and a keyboard is not a good performance instrument.

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.

When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.

The base skill is listening: how I'm listening to the material, how I'm listening to the space. With electronic sound, it's a similar situation of how to produce it and place it so that it works in a space. The first consideration is adopting the space and having work that resonates in the space.

I try to influence this improvisation in two ways. One is by centering on reflections, in both senses of the word: acoustic reflections as well as visual reflections from a mirror or surface, and then reflecting on the material in a contemplative way. The other influence is listening to the tails of the sounds that you make.

Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening

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.

Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.

One day I decided I would like to put a record into my system. So I picked up a record that was lying on the table, and put it on. I didn't bother to look at what it was because I didn't care, and it turned out to be Madame Butterfly. So I processed the aria from Madame Butterfly in my system and I played with it.

In my Deep Listening class at RPI, I always do an hour of energy exercises to start with. Then we do a listening meditation after that, after the body has been loosened up and warmed up and is ready. We do the listening. After that, there's the journaling of the experience, which they do each time throughout the semester to the point that I have them write a final paper on what they've experienced.

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.

Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.

First of all I had to teach myself how to use the studio because there wasn't any classes in electronic music. So I'd stay there all night and leave in the morning, observe the sun rise and have a lot of different kinds of sounds in my mind. But it was a quest, it was a search. It was research, it was learning.

It was around the end of the '60s, when I began to compose sonic meditations. Before that I was doing a lot of reflecting on myself, and listening to long tones.

It might be fun to have audience members wander up the ramps as well, so they can listen from different vantage points.

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.

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.

The students were missing out a lot in their ensemble playing because they weren't listening to each other or the environment.

I think that this performance with the Thingamajigs is going to be an exploration of the acoustic space and particularly the vertical space, which we don't think about so much.

When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.

[My interest in music] is from my mother and my grandmother, who were pianists, and they taught.

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 .

I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.

Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening

People's experiences are all different, and you don't know what the person experienced. They know, but you don't, so I think it's important to listen carefully to what a person has to say. And not to force them into any direction at all but simply to model what you've experienced, model it and also be what I call a Listening Presence. If you're really listening, then some of the barriers can dissolve or change.

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears

That change happened about 1991. It was not possible to transfer the Expanded Instrument System to the computer until then, when 16-bit recording became available.

Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.

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.

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.

I feel that students always learn more from each other than they do from their professor. They learn by doing and not by trying to soak up information from one person.

There is a book called San Francisco Tape Music Centre:1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and this book describes everything that you want to know or don't want to know about it, with a lot of documentation.

I try to schedule the Intensives wherever I go.

I noticed you could monitor the recording that you're making, but you could also monitor the playback head. There's a little distance between them and so you get an echo, right? If you change the amplitude of, say, the playback and play with that, you get different qualities and different sounds. So I was very interested in that phenomenon.

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.

That's software in the States that I helped to develop. It enables people with disabilities to improvise.

I heard a lot of different kinds of music. I heard country music, I heard jazz, I heard symphonic music, opera, everything you can think of except very modern music.

I used to go into the studio around midnight and stay all night.

I had to cope with attitudes that were not supportive all along. I mean, you still have that.

[Improvisation ] is been with me all my life. We all do it.

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.

I have a variety of ways that I make music, but I'm working with the Thingamajigs in a particular way, which is: They are bringing to me their performance skills and their unusual instruments, which I'm relishing. They're really beautiful. The other thing is improvisation - these players improvise and they do it very beautifully, as a matter of fact.

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.

Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.

Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.

I am also interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.

I got very interested in attention and awareness and how to achieve certain states through understanding this.

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.

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.

I became interested in the delay, having sounds recorded and played back and then come back. I did many different configurations of sending signals from one track back to another track, or to the same track, or crisscrossing them and so forth. I worked on masking the delays so when I played into the machine, I would make long tones and collect sounds in such a way that you didn't hear the delay, although sometimes you did.

I didn't have any sophisticated equipment at all. The equipment we had in the studio at the time was not intended to make music; it was for testing purposes. So we had to repurpose all the equipment to make music. That made me try a lot of different things.

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.

I had invented my own system, my own way of making electronic music at the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, and I was using what is now referred to as a classical electronic music studio, consisting of tube oscillators and patch bays. There were no mixers or synthesizers. So I managed to figure out how to make the oscillators sing. I used a tape delay system using two tape recorders and stringing the tape between the two tape machines and being able to configure the tracks coming back in different ways.

I would play a long tone on my accordion, or I'd sing one, and I would note how it felt - what it did with my mental space. These were meditations that I did.

That was at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in about 1989. There were 6,000 women there, and they were out in a meadow, and I offered the tuning meditation and they did it.

Deep Listening is listening to everything all the time, and reminding yourself when you're not. But going below the surface too, it's an active process. It's not passive. I mean hearing is passive in that soundwaves hinge upon the eardrum. You can do both. You can focus and be receptive to your surroundings. If you're tuned out, then you're not in contact with your surroundings. You have to process what you hear. Hearing and listening are not the same thing.

I'm very interested in vertical space.I want the players to listen to their sound in such a way that they hear the complete sound they make before they make another one. So that means that they hear the tail of the sound. Because of the reverberation, there's always more to the sound than just the sound.

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.

I think the worst thing is stereotyping.

Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.