Pauline Oliveros famous quotes

04-17-2025

Listening is not the same as hearing and hearing is not the same as listening
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Listening #Hearing
Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Listening
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
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Musical #Listening #Matter
Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Feet #Ears #Walks
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Music #Mean #Focus
Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Decision #Listening #Acting
I am also interested in music expanding consciousness. By expanding consciousness, I mean that old patterns can be replaced with new ones.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Mean #Patterns #Consciousness
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Thinking #People #Listening
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Player #Thinking #Space
Deep listening is experiencing heightened awareness or expanded awareness of sound and of silence, of quiet, and of sounding - making sounds.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Silence #Listening #Sound
Everybody improvises their way through every day. And so I do that with music.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Way
When I composed the first sonic meditation, I realized that I was composing the direction of attention.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Meditation #Attention #Firsts
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Mean #Player #Space
When I am composing, the sounds are leading me to the way I want them to organize.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Sound #Want #Way
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

#Thinking #Opposites #Space
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Beautiful #Reality #Trying
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Long #Track #Delay
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Trying #Information #Students
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Running #Filters #Stereotype
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Skills #Space #Listening
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Book #San Francisco #Tape
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Reflection #Mirrors #Two
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.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Play #Space #Long
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

#Baby #Upset #Sound
I think the worst thing is stereotyping.
-- Pauline Oliveros

#Thinking #Stereotype #Worst

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