Few people devote more time to thinking about how to listen than composers. Composer Pauline Oliveros has devoted her life to exploring the listening process. Throughout her career, she has united the processes of composition and performance. Oliveros says that “composition gives you time to change your mind, while improvisation provides an edge where what you do is it. I do both. I like collaboration and enjoy opportunities to work with different people from diverse communities.” Oliveros further composes and improvises in the context of performance: “I have always loved performance. I wanted to be in contact with sound and moving sound in real time.”¹⁹

Pauline Oliveros grew up in rural Texas, where she was influenced by the sounds of the natural environment. She also spent hours listening to the radio, remembering that she “loved the static and tuning whistles to be found in between the stations.” She learned to play the piano from her mother and grandmother, and was fascinated when her mother brought home an accordion in 1942. Oliveros was always interested “in what I could hear and the sensual nature of sound.”

After moving from Texas to the San Francisco area in the mid-1950s, Oliveros began to experiment, recording her surroundings by placing a microphone on a window ledge. She discovered that the microphone picked up sounds that she had not heard. Realizing that her own perceptions were selective, filtering some sounds out, she resolved to listen more carefully. She also continued to play the accordion, composing new works for the instrument over the years, including a 1982 composition, The Wanderer, for twenty-three accordions.

Seeking a more organic approach to composition and rejecting conventional musical notation, Oliveros formed the group Sonics with two other composers. Early on, she began to improvise with new resources for electronic and tape music. “It never interested me to cut and splice tape or to wait for numbers to crunch in a computer,” she recalls. “I wanted immediate results. . . . It was really thrilling to hear the sounds that I got and to shape them in real time like a performance, even if it were in a studio.” Eventually, Oliveros developed the Expanded Instrument System (EIS), which provided control during performance of aspects of pitch and timbre that could usually be shaped only in a studio. EIS (pronounced “ice”) is a “continually developing electronic sound-processing environment designed to provide improvising musicians control over various parameters of sound transformation.” Foot pedals and switches control various digital delays, reverberation units, mixers, and processors, with output distributed to speakers around the performance space.

In 1988, Oliveros formed the Deep Listening Band, which has performed worldwide and made recordings. The band has used a variety of sound sources, including trombone, didjeridu, conch shells, voices, pieces of metal, and, of course, the accordion. The band performs in highly resonant spaces and much of its music features a drone, which Oliveros sees “as connecting it to other musics.”

Deep listening has become a central pursuit for Oliveros, who explains the concept as follows:

Composer/performer Pauline Oliveros with her accordion.

The key to multi-level existence is deep listening. Deep listening includes language and its syntax, the nature of sound, atmosphere and environmental context. This is essential to the process of unlocking layer after layer of imagination, meaning, and memory down to the cellular level of human experience. Listening is the key to performance. Responses, whatever the discipline, that originate from deep listening are connected in resonance with being and inform the artist, art, and audience in an effortless harmony. . . . Deep listening is a lifetime practice.