05 April 2021

Pauline Oliveros | deep listening

Pauline Oliveros was a composer, performer, and humanitarian whose career spanned fifty years of boundary dissolving music making. She founded Deep Listening Institute, formerly Pauline Oliveros Foundation, now the Center For Deep Listening at Rensselaer in Troy, NY.

The Met gardens & cloisters

In the '50s she was part of a circle of iconoclastic composers, artists, poets gathered together in San Francisco. In the 1960's she influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual.


Oliveros was Distinguished Research Professor of Music at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and Darius Milhaud Artist-in-Residence at Mills College. She founded "Deep Listening®,"  which came from her childhood fascination with sounds and from her works in concert music with composition, improvisation and electro-acoustics. 


She described Deep Listening as a way of 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, of one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds.

360* video of "Tuning Meditation" of Pauline Oliveros 
at the Met Cloisters


The podcast Meet the Composer and host Nadia Sirota welcomed audiences to the Met Cloisters for an afternoon of radio and music making. More than 100 people gathered to sing Pauline Oliveros's Tuning Meditation in the illustrious FuentidueƱa Chapel.


This is a recording of the audio in binaural sound, which mimics how the human brain places sound in space. Please use your headphones for optimal enjoyment.


The FuentidueƱa Apse, Spanish, c 1175–1200


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