Pauline Oliveros Quotes

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

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

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

Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears

Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think the worst thing is stereotyping.

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.

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.

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

Radio broadcasting was only 25 years old when I was born in 1932.

The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].

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.

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.

The sound that I play is delayed, it's modified, and it's modulated. It's an intelligent system; it's happening now.

All the way from the first thing that I can remember, like our Victrola - a wind-up record player - and my grandfather's crystal radio, and my father's shortwave radio.

The San Francisco Tape Music Centre was a kind of collective non-profit that my friends and I got started so that we could pool our equipment and make tape music.

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 .

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

After a long section of the glass playing, you'll hear an instrumental sound emerge from some undisclosed location. There'll be a lot of mystery about the sound, I think.

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

I felt a challenge to compose music. That's where my challenge was, for the most part.

In the beginning we were making tape music, meaning, we were making music on tape.

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 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.

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.

I try to schedule the Intensives wherever I go.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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