A Quote by Pauline Oliveros

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
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.
[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.
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.
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.
A line runs from the meditations of the heart to the words of the mouth. The meditations are not clear to us until the mouth utters its words. If what the mouth utters is unclear or foolish or mendacious, it must be that the meditations are the same. But the line runs both ways. The words of the mouth will become the meditations of the heart, and the habit of loose talk loosens the fastenings of our understanding.
One of the key guitars in my career has been an early-Seventies Fender Telecaster Deluxe that I had before Sonic Youth started and that I played pretty much throughout Sonic Youth.
What our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one's meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.
It's very hard to take a character out of nothing, and put a hook on it, especially because it's only sonic. Futurama is a sonic world, and everyone's attention is focused on that sound and that little cartoon image. You can change it.
The collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field. These sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as totality, is a new sonic event.
I've always been an acoustic guitar player, and I've pretty much continued to play acoustic guitar throughout all of the Sonic Youth periods. My material for Sonic Youth often started on acoustic guitar.
I don't make sonic booms. I want a whip. I like the idea of walking around making sonic booms everywhere.
Every kid has a laptop; everyone can make music, so in order to stand out, I think it's important to find that sonic identity, I think my sonic identity - and mine is finding these weird sounds that may not necessarily sound that musical, and make them sound musical.
It's about the stories. If I write 14 stories that I love, then the next step is to get the environment of music around it to best envelop the story, and all kinds of sonic goodness - sonic goodies.
Whenever I felt down, whenever I started wondering what homeless shelter I would die in, [my mother] would buck me up by telling me: you know, Paul, the A students work for the B students, the C students run the companies, and the D students dedicate the buildings.
Line up a group of Horace Mann students, interview them, and take a look at their resumes, and you'll be hard pressed to pick out the students who require extra time. So then, what qualifies these students to receive special accommodations on the SAT?
Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people's perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition - and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.
I think Thurston's and my weird tunings lent Sonic Youth a very different sound from the get-go. In the band's 30 years - aside from covers - there are maybe two or three songs we wrote using traditional tuning.
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