Pauline Oliveros Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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'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.

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.

Now, I have about twenty per hand and can change the number of delays, change different parameters, the delays to the modulations and so forth. I developed the EIS over the time period that I was just talking about [1991].

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.

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.

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

I can't really deal with buttons. And that's what I keep saying, "Okay, I can't push buttons, because that means I have to take my hands off the keyboard or the buttons or whatever. Don't you understand!" .

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.

Listening is selecting and interpreting and acting and making decisions.

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.

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.

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'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.

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

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

Deep Listening Institute is dissolving and is now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The legacy of the twenty or thirty years that we've been operating is now transferred to RPI.

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 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.

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

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 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.

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