Pauline Oliveros
Composer, author and educator Pauline Oliveros has dedicated her life to sound and to listening. One of electronic music’s most important early figures, she was an original member of the pioneering San Francisco Tape Music Center and its first director. A founder of the Deep Listening Institute, she now conveys the message that sound and its effects are powerful equalizers. Her works are meditations on the ocean of sound that listeners can find themselves in, embracing the rapture of audible sensation. A recipient of many awards and a participant in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, her engagement with sound continues to influence generations. Sitting on the couch at the 2016 Red Bull Music Academy, Oliveros recalled how she created her own instruments and how listening can help change how you hear.
Hosted by Hanna Bächer A guy that you might have heard of called John Cage is often quoted saying that he knows now what harmony is, because of Deep Listening and Pauline Oliveros, and that it’s about the pleasure of making music. Please welcome Pauline Oliveros. Pauline Oliveros Thank you. Thank you. Hanna Bächer I like demographic statistics and I actually looked up that you’re nine years older than I will statistically ever be. Which year was it that you picked up the accordion? Pauline Oliveros I was nine years old, so let’s see, nine plus two is... Hanna Bächer I’ll help you. It must have been 1941. Pauline Oliveros That’s when it was. Yes. Hanna Bächer If I imagined little Pauline back then sitting in her room playing the accordion, when you weren’t playing what was it that you were hearing? Pauline Oliveros What was it that I was hearing? I was hearing all of the insects and birds and animals that were sounding in the Houston, Texas, environment, which was very dense. It was almost like a rainforest, so that was the overall sound that I was interested in. I liked the cicadas very much. All different kinds of things that I heard. I was fascinated with listening as far back as I can remember. Hanna Bächer Was there any other sound source around that was human made, such as radio? Pauline Oliveros Oh, radio, of course. I used to enjoy my grandfather tuning his crystal radio. I liked the sounds of tuning the radio much more than the program. My father had a shortwave radio, which also I enjoyed the sounds of the shortwave turning as well. Those were sounds that I liked. Hanna Bächer Do you mind explaining what a crystal radio is for those who don’t know, including me? Pauline Oliveros Well, the device had crystals in it. I don’t know that I understand or knew what the construction was, just that I knew that that was called a crystal radio. I think you can find it on Google pretty easy. Now. Hanna Bächer When you left Texas and went to study in California, at that time was it already established to teach music in universities or was that still quite a new thing? Pauline Oliveros Oh no, music was taught, but it was more conservative. It was a conservative kind of music. There were no electronic music studios and it was mostly centered on western European music. Hanna Bächer What was the first time that you were actually laying your hands on a tape machine? Was that at San Francisco State College? Pauline Oliveros Well, the first recording machine that I had experience with, my mother bought, and it was a wire recorder, so you recorded on wire. Hanna Bächer I don’t know how that worked. Pauline Oliveros Well, it works with electromagnetism and the information is stored on a wire. It runs around like a magnetic tape does, but it’s wire instead of tape. Magnetic tape. The next thing that happened for me was getting a tape recorder for the first time, again from my mother. She’s very generous and sent me a tape recorder. It was from Sears Roebuck and it was one of the first consumer models, because tape machines were not available until after the second World War and veterans brought home tape machines from Germany. In California, the Ampex tape machine... Ampex was formed and produced tape machines. They were mostly disseminated to radio stations, so that’s how that happened. As soon as I got my first tape recorder I put the microphone in the window of my apartment and recorded. What I noticed was that there were sounds on the tape that I had not heard, so I tap myself on the shoulder now, anytime I record, make sure I listen to everything. I tell myself to listen to everything all the time. That’s my trip. [laughs] Hanna Bächer You went to California to study in San Francisco and there are a few people that you met. Some of them you continued working with, or communicating with, for many, many years to come. Pauline Oliveros Until now. Hanna Bächer Until now. Where did you first meet, for example, Terry Riley? Pauline Oliveros Terry and I were in the same class at San Francisco State College in 1953, I guess. Also, Loren Rush, who probably is not as well known as Terry, but he’s a very wonderful composer. We met at San Francisco State College. Hanna Bächer Who else was part of your group? Was La Monte Young in your vicinity back then? Pauline Oliveros Yes, he was, but not until later. What happened is that Terry and Loren and I actually formed what was maybe one of the very first free improvisation groups. We did that because Terry had to write a film score, five minutes, and he didn’t have time to write it, so we went into the studio at Radio KPFA where Loren Rush was a program assistant and had access to that Ampex tape machine. We sat down and Loren was playing koto and percussion, and Terry piano, and myself I was playing French horn. We improvised several soundtracks, five-minute soundtracks, without discussing what we were going to do. We just listened and played spontaneously, and then Terry took one of those tracks and used it for the film. Then we decided, after listening to our playback, that maybe this would be fun to do more, so we started meeting several times and playing and recording. We discovered that if we tried to plan it then it would fall flat, but if we just played and let the conversation develop spontaneously, we would always get something that was interesting. Hanna Bächer Was that what got called Sonics? Was that the Sonics group? Pauline Oliveros No. What happened next was that Terry and Loren both went to Europe. They had gotten their MAs, I guess, MFAs at University California, Berkeley, and that’s where La Monte Young comes into the picture, because he was in their class. I visited that class once in a while and met La Monte and so on, and then Terry and La Monte got together to do some projects, and so on, and so that was how that happened that La Monte began to be a part of the community that we were establishing in San Francisco. Hanna Bächer This community, or this group, started the San Francisco Tape Music Center, or at least a few of you did. Pauline Oliveros No. No, it wasn’t. The San Francisco Tape Music Center came out of another liaison, which was with Ramon Sender Barayón. I met him through my teacher, my mentor, Robert Erickson. Robert Erickson taught a semester at San Francisco State. That’s when I first met him and first heard his music and he heard mine. Loren Rush, whom I’ve already mentioned, was studying with him and then I began to study with Robert as well, with Bob. Then, Robert Erickson began to teach at the San Francisco Tape... No. San Francisco Conservatory. He had a musicianship class that I attended and that’s where I met Ramon. Ramon and I started to improvise together because Terry and Lauren were already gone to Europe. That was the next step towards Sonics. Sonics was a series of concerts that were put on at the Conservatory. They always included a free improvisation to begin with. We would play our tape pieces that we made and then Morton Subotnick joined us and we began to have improvisations including Mort. From there, the idea was to form a studio, a center for experimental music, so to speak. In the meanwhile, I was lucky enough to win a prize in the Netherlands from Gaudeamus [Foundation] for my chorus, “Sound Patterns” for mixed chorus. I went to Europe for maybe six months or so. When I came back, Morton and Ramon had gotten a non-profit status for the San Francisco Tape Music Center, so then I joined in when I came back. That’s how the San Francisco Tape Music Center got formed. Hanna Bächer Can we please see the first picture? Who is in that? Pauline Oliveros OK. You see Anthony Martin. Anthony Martin on this end, Bill McGuinness, Ramon, and Mort, and myself. Hanna Bächer Looking very happy. Pauline Oliveros We were. We had a great time. It was really fun. If I had the option to go back in time, I think I’d go back there. Hanna Bächer We're kind of going to go back in time and play an early piece. Not “Sound Patterns,” but “Time Perspectives” from 1959. Pauline Oliveros “Time Perspectives” was the very first tape piece that I made. Hanna Bächer Should we listen to a bit of it and then speak about it? Pauline Oliveros Sure. (music: Pauline Oliveros – “Time Perspectives” / applause) Hanna Bächer There is 16 more minutes for everyone who got curious. Pauline Oliveros That is included on a box set. It’s called Tape and Electronic Music from 1961 – 1970. There’s about 12 hours of tape and electronic music in that box set, including “Time Perspectives.” Hanna Bächer What did you use for that piece? Pauline Oliveros What did I use? OK. These are improvised sounds using found objects of various kinds and voice. For filters, I used cardboard tubes. Put the microphone at the end of the tube, so you hear voices modified by the acoustics of the tube. I had different links of cardboard tubes to use. I think I used a wooden apple box to place small objects on and sound them either by striking or friction or activating like a metal strip to vibrate on the box and pick it up with the microphone. I didn’t do a lot of cutting and splicing of tape. I thought that was too labor intensive. [laughs] I would improvise very long sections of the piece and then put them together as a continuity. This was a time where there were no mixers, so I had to use, what, a patch bay to put sounds together. I made a four-channel version of this piece there. What we had then was two stereo tapes that had to be lined up to play them together out of four speakers, which we did at the conservatory. Hanna Bächer How hands-on did you get in your work with tape? Pauline Oliveros Hands-on? Hanna Bächer Yeah. Did you push, pull it? Pauline Oliveros Yes. There was the fact that my home tape recorder... See, I didn’t work at the conservatory. I worked at home and I had the tape recorder and the second tape recorder that I acquired, which was a Silvertone tape recorder from Sears Roebuck. I had that. It had the property or the function that I could hand-wind the tape and record at the same time, so I could get variable speed recording. It also had two speeds, three and three quarters and seven and a half, so I could record at seven and a half and drop it to three and three quarters, or the reverse. Record at three and three quarters and raise it to seven and a half. Those were the kinds of processes that were available to me or that I just invented for myself. Hanna Bächer Did you get involved in inventing and building instruments, as well? I know that at one point you helped Morton Subotnick push a piano down the stairs so it would break and you could reassemble it. You don’t remember, but he does. Pauline Oliveros I think he thinks that, but that was not me. Hanna Bächer Oh. Pauline Oliveros That was a story that Mort invented, I must tell you. Hanna Bächer Morton, if you’re watching this... Pauline Oliveros Mort is very inventive. [laughs] This is not the first time that I’ve heard a story about me coming from Morton Subotnick that is totally off the wall, not true. Hanna Bächer It’s beautiful to know that our past is colorful in other people’s minds, isn’t it? Pauline Oliveros Some day, there will be some writing about what I did. I don’t know. Hanna Bächer Did you get involved in building instruments, so that you started assembling your own machines of any sort? Pauline Oliveros I would say that the instrument that I built is an interface that I designed. I had to have programmers to program it in Max/MSP, but at first, it was totally analog. I got very interested in the distance between the record head on a tape machine and the playback head. That little distance meant that you had a delay. OK. If you monitored both of them at the same time, the recording head and the playback head, which you could do. You could monitor those both. Then, you had the possibility of changing the amplitude of, say, the playback and when you did that and you had the record head open, then you would begin to get a kind of reverberation, and that was very fascinating to hear, so I worked with that. Eventually, I started stringing tape from one machine to a second machine so that the signal that I put in would pass two playback heads. You couldn’t do two record heads or you would erase what you had already. You didn’t want to do that. Once I did that, then the possibility of routing the signal from, say, the second playback head back to the first or back to the second, you could create all kinds of interesting rhythmic configurations. That’s pretty evident in a piece of mine, which is called, “Bye Bye Butterfly.” Hanna Bächer Should we listen to it? Pauline Oliveros OK. To answer your question, I consider the expanded instrument system, which I now still use and used last night in my concert, an instrument. It’s an environment. It’s an instrument that you can play and it plays back with you. Hanna Bächer We will get back to the EIS, the Expanded Instrument System, in a bit. This is “Bye Bye Butterfly.” (music: Pauline Oliveros – “Bye Bye Butterfly” / applause) Pauline Oliveros Thank you. Hanna Bächer This is a piece that you made at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Pauline Oliveros Absolutely, yes. Hanna Bächer You had become its director in 1961 after you returned from Europe, is that right? Pauline Oliveros I had done what? Hanna Bächer You had become the director of the... Pauline Oliveros No, I was not the director at that point. I was not the director until we moved the Tape Music Center to Mills College. Then I was the director in 1966 to 67. Hanna Bächer Before you moved the Tape Music Center to Mills College, how did you finance it? What kind of space was it and how did you get it? Pauline Oliveros The Tape Music Center? Hanna Bächer Yes. Pauline Oliveros We had rented a space that was on Divisadero Street in San Francisco. 321 Divisadero. That was our location. It had been a, I can’t think of what it was before, but it had a small concert hall where we could seat about 150 people. We built a subscription audience for tape music there. The studio was upstairs. A nice-sized room. We had big equipment those days, not so miniature as it is today. No mixer, not yet. We had a large telephone patch bay so that we could passively mix sounds. There were, let’s see, I think we had two big machines. They had been donated from Ampex for the Tape Music Center and various other items. It was pretty basic. It was considered what you called a “classical electronic music studio” because it was built out of equipment that was never intended for making music. It was equipment that was for testing in laboratories and… Like that. The sounds that you heard on “Bye Bye Butterfly” were made with tube oscillators. The way that I made them, I invented my own way of making electronic music at the time, was to set the oscillators above the range of hearing, say, around 40,000 Hertz. Then there would be differences between the two or three oscillators that I would use. If you know what a tube oscillator looks like, it has a big dial in the center of the face and it has the possibility of setting ranges so you can go above the range of hearing or in a certain range that is in hearing and below the range of hearing. The only way you could change the pitch of the sound was me to turn this dial, so that was not necessarily a good way to make some music. By setting these oscillators at above the range of hearing... I learned this from my accordion teacher. He taught me to listen to difference tones. Difference tones are the difference between two or more frequencies because they produce the difference between them below, and also above. At 40,000, in that range, you hear the low difference tones. When I first heard the difference tone sounding, and it corroborated my way, then I added the tape delay system that was used in “Bye Bye Butterfly.” The way I was playing the oscillators was by just barely turning the dials. I had reduced that aspect of oscillator playing to being able to sense where you wanted to be in an improvisational way, and by listening to what was coming out. I was listening intently, and performing, to get the sounds that I got. I was very interested in layering sounds, and in taking the same tone and then microscopically varying so that you got side bands, they were called. This was a simple setup, actually, but it could produce very complex results. Hanna Bächer There’s another piece that you worked with difference tones on that is “I of IV.” Pauline Oliveros Yes. That was at the University of Toronto, here in... No, this is Montréal. Sorry, I was in Toronto last week. Hanna Bächer Same country, though. Pauline Oliveros There was a summer program, where a number of composers came to learn about electronic music. University of Toronto had one of the best classical electronic music studios at the time. That was the summer of 1966. The Tape Music Center was a really ragtag studio. We just put things together the best as possible, but at UTMS there were twelve Lafayette oscillators, tube oscillators. They were each one connected to a key on a keyboard, which was not necessarily my interest, but I was able to say, “Put a weight on a key,” so that I could keep the tone sounded while I could play the oscillators the way I did in “Bye Bye Butterfly” for this “I of IV.” It was also a four-channel piece that was done at that studio. I had gone there because I wanted to learn more about electronic music. I also studied with Hugh Le Caine. Hugh Le Caine was a wonderful engineer who made some of the first electronic instruments to play. That was a very good summer. This piece came out of that. Hanna Bächer Let’s listen to a bit of it. This is “I of IV.” (music: Pauline Oliveros – “I of IV” / applause) Pauline Oliveros Thank you. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Hanna Bächer You just mentioned Hugh Le Caine, who you worked with in Toronto, was an instrument developer, but there’s another instrument developer who came by at the San Francisco Tape Music Center to work with Morton Subotnick. That is Don Buchla. Were you interested in his work at that point? Were you interested in synthesizers? Pauline Oliveros (laughs) No. I wasn’t. I certainly have great respect for Don, and Don just passed away very recently. Morton and Ramon advised him... What had happened, they had tried to be in connection with different engineers to see if they could get a modular synthesizer according to the specifications that they were interested in. That’s how that worked. It was their collaboration with Don and he produced the Buchla Modular Synthesizer. When Don was demonstrating it, I was upstairs making “Bye Bye Butterfly.” The thing is that I didn’t like the sound of transistors, not after working so intently with tubes, with tube oscillators. The sound of tube oscillators is different than the sound of transistor oscillators. The frequency response of the Buchla Synthesizer was... I couldn’t set oscillators up to 40,000, for example, because I think the cut off was maybe 20 or maybe 30. I don’t remember now exactly, but it didn’t have the range at the time of what those oscillators that I had been working with had. I had a little hard time to transition from working with that classic electronic music studio to the new modular synthesizer, but I certainly did have to do that and did when the San Francisco Tape Music Center was moved to Mills College. Morton Subotnick had been teaching there and Mills and Steve Reich, by the way, had done his master’s there at the same time. Hanna Bächer Steve Reich was involved in maybe the most famous piece that got ever made at San Francisco Tape Music Center. It was the premiere of “In C.” He was playing the piano, right? Pauline Oliveros He was playing, but that was Terry Riley’s piece. Hanna Bächer Of course, but Steve Reich was playing. Pauline Oliveros Yes, he was playing. Hanna Bächer Another popular piece at the time was… Pauline Oliveros “In C” is still very much played in many places, yes. Hanna Bächer Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon” was a very popular piece at that time and also broader pop culture, right? Pauline Oliveros Yes. Hanna Bächer Did that lead to pop musicians or rock musicians at that time coming to San Francisco Tape Music Center and wanting to collaborate with you? Pauline Oliveros They came not to collaborate with us, but to learn about electronic music. Anthony Martin, who was pictured in the... Our visual artist... Began to do rock shows at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco and later in New York at the Fillmore with the rock bands. All the light shows that you see today had their seed from the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Hanna Bächer You though, had studied in a classical music environment, how did those people react to what you were doing in the San Francisco Tape Music Center, you and your group? Pauline Oliveros They weren’t exactly interested. Some people were and so gradually things changed. With a move of the Tape Center to Mills one of the things that was important to me in the contract… This was with the Rockefeller Foundation, they wanted us to have a responsible fiscal agent. That was Mills, not us crazy artists. [laughs] Hanna Bächer Were you a crazy artist? Pauline Oliveros I still am. [applause] Hanna Bächer That’s true. Pauline Oliveros Maybe crazier, who knows. Hanna Bächer When you picked the name San Francisco Tape Music Center, was there ever a debate about it being called Music, did you debate the term music? Pauline Oliveros Of course, that isn’t music. [laughs] I made a piece while I was in Toronto at the UTMS called, “But Is It Music?” It was like a Gertrude Stein piece where the phrase, “But is it music,” was looped and played against itself until it finally just disintegrated. Hanna Bächer I don’t have this piece but I want to listen to a later piece, actually an extract of a performance of yours, the Tuning Meditation at The Kitchen in New York. Pauline Oliveros OK, well all right. (music: Pauline Oliveros – Tuning Meditation live / applause) Hanna Bächer What I find specifically interesting with this piece is that you likened the human body to a computer system in other of your texts and interviews, saying that if you give humans code they can solve problems and in this case you gave them code. Pauline Oliveros Right. Hanna Bächer The desired result is them making sounds. Pauline Oliveros Yeah it’s an algorithm actually. Hanna Bächer You were giving people algorithms to become instruments. Pauline Oliveros Yes, that’s right, that’s building instruments. Hanna Bächer Can music be made without humans then or in your understanding, an instrument always includes a human? Pauline Oliveors Yes, for me it does because humans are very inventive and creative and so then things happen that you wouldn’t have been able to write, yeah. Hanna Bächer You’ve mentioned the term Expanded Instrument System earlier, if it’s just humans as in the piece that we just heard, does that already count as Expanded Instrument System or does it have to be technology? Pauline Oliveros Well Expanded Instrument System is about delay times. So it does requires equipment, yes. In the early days of the Expanded Instrument System it was me lugging around a couple of tape recorders. It was a heavy duty experience to set that up and do it. I had done it in a studio but now I had to carry tape machines. I think what I had were a couple of Sony Triple 7 recorders, which were not exactly lightweight, that I would carry around, but they weren’t as heavy as an Ampex machine, a big studio machine. It was very interesting. You needed a truck load, or train load of equipment to do things in the very first instance of trying to make electronic music. Through the years it’s come down to the fact that you can do things on your phone now, but not then. I must remind you that there were no mixers in this San Francisco Tape Music Center and no mixers in Mills either for a while. Things had to be done in a variety of ways that you would figure out. Hanna Bächer Saying that you didn’t have mixers in the San Francisco Tape Music Center and now people can do things on their phones, does it surprise you how fast things went or this exactly how you imagined the future in 1961 or 1950? Pauline Oliveros I did not imagine what would happen, no, not like that. It was not that predictive. Hanna Bächer You’ve said that the EIS, the Expanded Instrument System is always about delays. Pauline Oliveors Yes. Hanna Bächer What is it specifically about delays that fascinates you? Pauline Oliveros I’m an accordion player. If I play a sound I have very little possibility to bend it. If I play the sound and then had a delayed sound return, I could bend it with a foot pedal so that I would send, I would have voltage control over the delayed sound. I got to be quite a pedal-er so that I can control the pitches with my feet that were coming back. That’s why delays were important because I couldn’t bend the original sound but I could certainly bend the second sounds or third or fourth, whatever. Hanna Bächer Reverb played a very important role too though in your work especially when I think about one day, actually in my hometown in Cologne in the late ’80s in a very deep cistern that you played in. Pauline Oliveros That’s right, yes. That was a 45 second reverb delay in the underground cathedral that was the water supply for Cologne, yes. It was a whole project, I forget the name of the person that instigated that. I was in Cologne to do something else and I was invited to the cistern. This was also very close to the time that Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis and I went to the cistern in Fort Ward and in Washington state, climbed down 14-foot ladder into the cistern which had 89 pillars and was made of reinforced concrete and had a 45 second reverb time. That’s where we made the CD that’s called Deep Listening. Hanna Bächer We’re going to listen to a bit of Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis… (music: Pauline Oliveors, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis – “Lear” / applause) Pauline Oliveros Thank you, thank you. Hanna Bächer This release… I think 1989. Pauline Oliveros Yes it was released in 1989 by New Albion Records. We made the recording, we went to the cistern in 1988. Hanna Bächer It’s called Deep Listening and is the namesake for... Pauline Oliveros For the practice. Hanna Bächer For the practice that you developed now over many years actually together with your partner who’s sitting over here. Pauline Oliveros Ione, yes. Hanna Bächer Ione. Maybe you’d like to introduce this practice to us. Pauline Oliveros Yes, well first of all I want to say that because we had decided that we had a release, we had to name the album. I came up with Deep Listening and then we laughed a lot, rolled on the floor because we had been 14 feet underground. Deep Listening comes from a pun. Punning can be good, you know it leads to... Hanna Bächer I agree. Pauline Oliveros What happened then was that I started naming different programs that we were doing deep listening. We had the first deep listening retreat was in 1991, it was in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico at a small retreat center where we were the only thing that was happening besides the generator for electricity. We had electricity from generation and water from rain, rain water up there. It was a very peaceful and wonderful place to start this practice. I said it was going to be a Deep Listening retreat but I didn’t know what that was. In the next, I would say eight years, I learned how to lead or facilitate, I rather like facilitation than leadership because that’s too hierarchical. Facilitation then is more collaborative with people. Then Ione, who is sitting right here has practiced listening in dreams as part of deep listening and facilitates what she called dream community, because when people start dreaming together they often have experiences in their dreams which are relational. It creates a kind of interesting community. It’s not about analyzing dreams. It’s about the creativity that comes from what happens in dreams. That’s part of our deep listening practice. What she does and then the other part is from Heloise Gold. Heloise is a movement practitioner and does Tai Chi and creative movement. That’s part also, of listening through the body. Which is very, very important to this practice. I just recently had an experience which I want to tell you about, because it illuminates deep listening very, very well. For a whole year now I have been working with Tarek Atoui, who is an improviser and composer and has commissioned instruments to be built for the hard of hearing and deaf. In my teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Tarek was in residence as an artist at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. He needed to interact with some students, so I had my seminar called New Instrumentation for Performance. The students, there were eight of them, were working on a project to build an instrument or interface for the hard of hearing and deaf. Which is a very interesting project. How do you do that? That took a bit of thought and experimenting and so on. At the end of the semester we had a concert with the student’s projects and another concert in May with instruments that Tarek had commissioned. Then the next time to be working together was in Bergen, Norway, last August. This past August. This was the first time that I got to work with this project with actually deaf people. There were three. On the first day of my residency there I interviewed Robert Demeter. He’s on Facebook as Demeter Robert, because there’s other Robert Demeters. Anyways, Robert was very, very beautiful and interesting and vibrant. We communicated through a translator. About halfway through I decided, the decision I would make would be to ask Robert to conduct my piece, which was called “Sensational Sounds for Hearing and Non-Hearing Performers.” When I arrived in Bergen, that’s all I had, was the title. That’s all. That decision to ask Robert to conduct the piece was a first kind of compositional decision, right? Then there were two more women, who were deaf. We also talked. We had the musicians that we were going to use for the piece, were from the Norwegian Philharmonic. There were a dozen of those musicians, and I asked the three deaf performers to teach the musicians how to perceive their instruments and play them. I told the musicians they had to leave their own instruments at home. That was another compositional decision. The instruments that were performed were all instruments that Tarek had commissioned. It was so beautiful to see them engaging, right away, the non-hearing and hearing performers because of the relationship turned around so that the deaf had something to teach to the hearing. Then, by the end of the evening, there was a two-hour time. The musicians were improvising with the instruments and sounding pretty good. Next day, I gave them the first section of the piece. Ione had contributed to this by taking them through dream processes so that their creative aspects of their dreams were presiding in there. The first section of the piece was called Eagle’s Nest, which was a dream name that one of the performers had had. Other performers had all kinds of interesting dream names, but this fit the section. It was Eagle’s Nest Ins and Outs. Robert’s task as conductor was to bring people in and take them out. That was a simplistic thing. What happened was that they started to do this improvisation and it was quite obvious that Robert, with no kind of amplification device at all, was perceiving the music. OK? It was clear. He conducted and gave the musicians expressiveness. The expressiveness came from his understanding of gesture and feeling and sensing, at some level, which is probably the whole body, the music. This was extraordinarily important to me. By the way, Robert conducted the whole piece, which was about 45 minutes, to an audience that was sold out. 600 people. The venue was the former Sentralbadet, which was the municipal swimming pool. Most of the instruments were set up in the deep end of the pool. Which was appropriate, right? Audience Member Without water. Pauline Oliveros Without water, right. You could imagine the water, if you wanted to. Hanna Bächer This is a good moment to open it up to questions, to Pauline or to each other, if you actually want to talk about this experience and about how radical quietness can be. Pauline Oliveros If you have a question for me, be sure that you’re on microphone from somewhere, otherwise I won’t be able to hear you because I’m hard of hearing, but not hard of listening. Hanna Bächer As long as their microphones are going around. Pauline Oliveros Good. Audience Member Hi. I just want to thank you for the inspiring performance last night, and the lecture and the meditation. It’s a question session, right? Hanna Bächer Whatever you like to say or to ask. You can sing if you like to. Pauline Oliveros Comment or dance, whatever. Audience Member I have a lot of questions, but I'll just throw one first that’s related to the meditation session. I realize you use a lot of the power of the silence in your music and also the way you form the concept. Last night, I realized the rhythm actually lies in the silence between the pads you were playing. I found that very interesting. I also realized that you use a lot of intentional sound if that’s how it should be addressed, like the sound that was not made on purpose to emphasize the sound that’s made on purpose. I want to ask you how you perceive the role of silence in your creative pattern? I’d like to know your thoughts on that. Pauline Oliveros I do practice what I call deep listening all the time. I’m always listening for what is around me as well as what is in my mind. In performing, I generate the first sound that happens and I’m listening to that. I have to listen. Maybe I listen exclusively or maybe I’m listening to everything. If I hear something, then I incorporate it into what I’m performing. For example, there was an interesting time in Vancouver, Canada of playing in a really beautiful wooden structure and I was playing solo accordion. Not the V-Accordion but my other accordion, the one that’s been through my life. Somewhere in probably 40 minutes into my performance, fire engines went by. After the performance, there were not one but there were three people came up to me and said, “How did you get the fire engines to go by on time?” The only answer I have is that I was listening and I heard them, so they became part of the piece. That’s called Pauline’s orchestration. [laughs] Audience Member I have another question. Besides using the silence, you have developed from analog to using technology, like you were talking about MaxMSP. And last night you were using this MIDI and laptop and all that together with the instrument. I want to know, how do you take the role of technology while you are making music and do you prefer one over another or like how do you perceive that? You said you have somebody programmed for yourself. Do you think your self is still, like the concept is still analog, but you’d like to use a technology to help you to make it the way you want or how do you perceive that? Pauline Oliveros You’re using the word technology to mean computer, right? Audience Member Yeah, like the development... Pauline Oliveros That’s okay. I’m an analog native, you heard, awhile back. It was about 1991. I started transitioning the expanded instrumentation to MaxMSP so that what had been analog before became computerized. The EIS System now is almost completely on MaxMSP, a program. However, there is always the analog end of that which is getting the signal out to speakers. Speakers are analog. What would replace speakers in the future, I am not sure. How would you materialize sound with just a computer? That’d be a pretty interesting project for somebody or somebodies to try to do. While they’re at it, it would be nice if they could materialize a person from one place to another so they didn’t have to fly on a plane. OK. All right. Does that answer your question? Audience Member Yeah, definitely. Audience Member Hello, how are you doing? Pauline Oliveros Hi. Audience Member Thanks so much for everything. I had a follow-up question to that, which is that the hybridization of the Extended Instrument System sounds really fascinating. I’d like to maybe know more about the detail of how you improvise with it? Not strictly on the MaxMSP programming but more how you’re interacting with it? Pauline Oliveros Yes. Well, of course I’ve done the data design all the way. The programmers help to make that possible and of course I’m always asking for more and more impossible things so that it keeps developing. There’s been an evolution of this system since 1966, I would say. Now, you asked me, what did you ask me? Audience Member Specifically I was wondering, when you’re performing, how do you interact with the system? I’m not totally clear how it works, so to speak. Pauline Oliveros I’m not totally clear either [laughs] but I don’t necessarily want to be. What I’m interested in is listening to what’s coming back and interacting with it, performing with it, just as I have told you how I do. The Expanded Instrument System has algorithmic changes so that if I play a sound, I don’t know what’s necessarily going to happen to it because it may come back modified. Changed in pitch, changed in modulations of some kind that act on the sound to bend it in various ways or whatever. Then I’m playing with it. What expanded means, not extended, but expanded, is I play in the present but I’m listening for the sound to come back in the future, but when it’s listening back, it’s in the past. The expansion is of time, so I consider it a time machine. Every sound that comes out of the speakers is sound that I made at some point in the performance, but that sound then has been processed algorithmically in the system, in the Expanded Instrument System. Audience Member That’s a beautiful clear explanation by the way, thank you. Is that something that is open source that you’re sharing with a wider community or is it exclusively something that you use yourself? Pauline Oliveros It’s MaxMSP right now. It’s not open source code but MaxMSP. If you know Max and want to work with it within the program, then you would have to work with it in Max right now. That’s possible, though. Audience Member Perfect, thank you. Hanna Bächer I have a follow-up question too, in regards to what he just said. With the hybridization of the system and you, do you consider technology to be part of yourself in a way that you consider yourself a kind of cyborg when you make music? Pauline Oliveros A cyborg, huh? Yes, of course I’m a cyborg. Not only that, I have replacement lenses in my eyes, for example. I have a couple of teeth that are... I mean, I’m on the way. Hanna Bächer That’s what I’m saying. When you’re playing, the technology is part of you. Pauline Oliveros Yes it is. I feel that. I feel intimately connected with what is happening, yes. Hanna Bächer You mentioned the Facebook presence of someone you worked with earlier. Deep listening is happening on social media, a lot, which I find kind of surprising because to me it would feel contradictory to have deep listening practice spread through a very noisy environment. Pauline Oliveros Well, I mean, just listen to it. Hanna Bächer Listen to the world wide web? Pauline Oliveros Listen to the noise. Listen to the noises, yeah. Somebody else? OK, hi. Audience Member Hello, thank you so much for this lecture. My question is, I guess you are aware of this thing called Schumann’s resonance. To me, my idea’s like, from that tone, that’s the tone which is proportional to the earth, like a bass tone that the earth produces, some kind of musical thinking. From that we build the world of vibrations in which music exists. Pauline Oliveros Exactly. Audience Member In relation to the proportion of the earth and the human body, do you think there may be some frequencies which are more suitable for this geometric proportion because we are surrounded by frequencies all the time? Some are very low, we don’t get. Some are very high, we don’t get, like telecommunication stuff. Also new meditation because you can start oscillating in a meditation and it goes higher. Do you think there’s a suitable range of frequencies for the human body to get some kind of special information of music? Pauline Oliveros I think you would be very, you could learn quite a bit by hanging out with the deaf community, because they don’t have hearing through ears, I mean their hearing is really through the whole body. That was so obvious to me and interesting in having Robert conduct my piece because him and his conducting gestures were very appropriate. He instigated different rhythmic patterns as well. He was perceiving what was going on, but he was also queuing people in a musical way. There is this deep listening in the deaf community which is informing me, but I’ve always liked being around the deaf community even though I haven’t learned sign. I still feel something very important going on in terms of expressivity and presence in their interchanges with one another. I think that’s where you can find some really interesting information. Audience Member That’s very good advice. Thanks. Pauline Oliveros You’re welcome. Audience Member Well, OK, I will ask anyway. First of all, you... Hanna just mentioned something about Facebook or something. Is there an instructionary, not instruction because that wouldn’t really fit, but facilitator or whatever of deep listening techniques or something where one could follow up on what the... The ideas of the... What was it again? The dream community and all these things you were talking about? Pauline Oliveros Yeah. Well, yes for sure. For example, Kathy Kennedy lives here in Montréal. Is Kathy here? She said she was going to come. Audience Member She’s online. Pauline Oliveros Online, yes. Anyway, Kathy Kennedy has what we call a deep listening certificate, which entitles her to teach deep listening workshops. She’s a person you could be in communication with. You can find her online. Kathy Kennedy. Audience Member Very interesting. Hanna Bächer There are videos on YouTube that you can watch with Pauline teaching, so if you go to deeplistening.org, I believe it is, then, yeah, you can see more. I think there were more questions from Matias? Audience Member Yeah, no, but if she wants ... Pauline Oliveros Let Ione speak first. Ione To add to that. We have deep listening programs, teaching, that are happening online, and they’re happening through the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer, so that people can actually study to have certificates in deep listening. That’s a totally online program. It’s very special and innovative. It’s wonderful. Pauline Oliveros Yes. For sure. Audience Member Thank you very much for that information. I will add another question which goes a little bit back to what they asked over there, but maybe formulate it in another way. When listening to your very insightful lecture, there was a lot about the fascination for instance for the radio sounds of the shortwave, which I can’t very much understand like this, and real reverbs, like a very physical approach also to things. I would say the physicality in some way, the imprint on a tape, which is something that I find that is analog, mechanical, physical in a way. What I was wondering, as opposed to this very physical approach of creating and exploring sound, we nowadays are somehow facilitated by obviously the digital technique that simulates all of this, simulated delays, simulated… In which somehow the things that you provoked or created via tape technique happened but in a simulated way. They don’t seem to really happen. Do you see in the physical process, which is for sure different because it’s a simulation, do you see also that this changes the quality of what it does in the environment? Following up on this, obviously, nobody of us, or many of us don’t have the access to either a system, a swimming pool, or a studio full of tube oscillators, which obviously are places that allow us to have this experience, therefore one goes to the accessibility of programs that are available for everyone, so I just wanted to listen to some reflection on this. Pauline Oliveros Yes, of course. Well, yes, it is pretty much different. I think that... For example, the commercial instruments that are available now, they may be short-changed in terms of frequency response. A simulation may take short cuts so that the simulation does not resemble completely the analog version. It’s getting better. I think things are getting better in terms of that, in terms of technology, computers, and programmers who are listening more. I’ve taught probably 300 or more engineers by now in my deep listening class at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I think some of them have been quite changed by participating and learning and actually improvising, composing, and performing. By the end of the semester, all the students have produced two recordings that they have mixed and edited to make a piece, maybe a three-minutes piece like that. Some of them have never had any experience at all in that respect. It’s really, again, it just comes down to how are you listening? What are you listening for in your work? Are the tools that you have adequate to express what you want to express? This is important, I think. You have to choose carefully, I think, because now your choices are so enormous actually, especially if you’re cruising around on the Internet, and if you are talking to people from all over the world, as you are here, which I think is absolutely fabulous, and also I just want to comment that I’m very impressed with the Red Bull Music Academy and how they’ve created this special place for you to be and to work and to interact with one another. That... The interaction that you have with each other is probably the most important of all, just as my interaction with Terry Riley and Loren Rush and Stewart Dempster in 1954, they’re lifelong friends. I’m still in touch with them. We do things sometimes. Stewart and I were in the Deep Listening Band all of about 25 years. People that you meet here are going to be with you in a variety of ways as you go along. That interaction, as I say, is a blessing, and is most important. Audience Member Thank you very much. Audience Member I have a question over here, on the left, your left. Yeah. Hi. I just wanted to ask about the... During deep listening meditation, we were encouraged to have an inclusive listening to the inside, to the outside, to what’s happening in far places, different dimensions. Do you think it’s possible to express that then when you transition into making music? That somehow reduces that listening to a melodic line or to... There’s certain constraints within that listening which are not in the inclusive listening that we experienced in meditation. Is there a way to reconcile this, or do you think it’s possible to express that feeling of deep listening, inclusive listening at all, through music or through sound? Is that what you’re striving for or is that music that you particularly enjoy listening to that’s something that attempts to do that or... Pauline Oliveros OK. For me if I’m sitting down to perform, I’m listening and I’m listening for everything. I’m trying to open to all the whole field of whatever it is that I’m involved with at the time. That’s why people came up to me and wanted to know how I could get the fire engines to go by on time, OK? If you’re in the studio, my work and analog came out of working in an analog studio. The important part was how I was listening to the studio instruments that were there and how I adapted them to my intentions, my purpose. The purpose and the intention came through the listening that I was doing. That’s always primary with me. I’m not saying I got to do this or that or the other and I got to make this plan and follow it. As I said in our improvisations, following a plan always failed because we couldn’t quite do it. It was better not to plan because then anything goes if you are listening. That’s my answer to you. I don’t know if it answers what you wanted. Audience Member Yeah, it does. In addition to that, personally through my own practice I found that gesture is a more immediate response to a listening practice rather than... so the sound is the next phase, because first you do the gesture and then the sound comes afterwards. Pauline Oliveros Mm-hmm. Audience member Do you find there’s a lot of... Do you work on the body at all? Movement is a very important part of it. Pauline Oliveros Yeah, very important. Listening though the body and sort of formalistic practices like Tai Chi and Chi Gung and yoga for example are good practices to keep you going but also creative movement is important so that you can move freely and find out things about your body through spontaneity. Spontaneity of just your movement, I think that’s really important and it’s part of the practice, yeah. Audience Member Thank you. Audience Member Hello, thank you so much for the lecture and the concert yesterday and all your work. Pauline Oliveros Thank you. Audience Member Maybe my question is obvious but I would like to hear your thoughts on why is it important deep listening? Why, yeah, why is it important? Pauline Oliveros Well it might not be important at all. I don’t know. After all it started from a pun right? Audience Member Puns are important too. Pauline Oliveros What is happening of course is that we have produced about at least 50, maybe more, deep listening certificate holders we call them, who have gone through our program and are now qualified to teach workshops. We’re producing quite a few more through our online course, deep listening certification which is run by Tomie Hahn who is the Director of the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer. The program is open and available. There’s new ones starting in January. It’s a one-year course and it meets on Sunday at 11am Eastern Time once a month with the instructors. For the first time in 2017 the instructors are all going to be deep listening certificate holders who have come along with us. Ione and Heloise and myself will visit the class to give input once or twice, whatever. We’re beginning to send it out to the certificate holders to carry it on. They are doing this because all of them, or not all of them, but many of them are doing workshops in different parts of the world now. They’re carrying deep listening forward. There’s a lot of inquiry and a lot of recognition that it seems to be helping in some ways and I hope in a lot of ways. Audience Member Thanks again for everything and for your wonderful lecture. My question relates to engineering and you spoke earlier that you’ve taught 300 engineers, that you have programmers who help you with your system that you use to perform and that also in your career you have been doing this for decades. I know with the EET lab these were collaborations also with engineers. I was wondering right now there are so many tools available which are produced mainly by engineers, and that are quite integral to new practices and artistic practices. How would you describe your interaction with engineers? Is it prescriptive? Do you know exactly what you want from them or is it more collaborative where ideas for interaction with your Expanded System and performance come about through understanding the criteria and objectives of the engineer? Pauline Oliveros OK, in my deep listening class everybody participates. First of all we do what I call energy exercises. Energy exercises go through the whole body and activate lymph flow, blood flow and electrical flow so that you begin to understand that you have nerve endings in the palms of your hands which you can actually feel electrical impulses. When you feel that, then you can begin to do things with that, so there’s that. Also, you have nerve endings in the soles of your feet so that you can sense what I call the three different energies, which is heat, you can feel the heat in your feet. My feet might be cold, we have that expression, “I got cold feet,” for something. You can feel the pull of gravity. You can feel what else, I forgot. Heat and electricity so you have the nerve endings in the soles of your feet. These energies, the exercises, help people to recognize these different kinds of signals in the body. This happens through a weekly practice of coming and doing these exercises. Some of the engineers began to use that and do these exercises. I recommended people who sit in front of a computer all day to get up and do what I call arm swinging. Swinging your arms forward and back which releases tension under the arms. A lot of us are just not aware how much tension we hold under our arms. This is part of what I teach, that’s one aspect. The next is doing listening meditation like we’ve done and I have different focuses that I give for the listening meditation. Then after the listening meditation there is a period of journaling so the students write down their experience of the exercises. Then there’s a break and after the break, I mean this is a four-hour seminar that takes care of the first two hours, then the second two hours is always some kind of workshop where for instance I ask people to bring a found object to class that they can make sound with and to find something that you can make all kinds of sounds with and that can be heard across the room. Then, when they bring their found objects, we listen to each person’s object but then I get them into small groups of say four or five people and they work together for some 15 minutes or so. Then we have everybody demonstrate or do an improvisation with their found sounds. Then the next project then is probably to record found sounds and make a piece with that. It keeps going like that until finally by the end of the semester they’ve produced two recordings of pieces and they’ve done improvisation. They’ve done composition, composing with found object and recorded pieces. They get a lot of experience of listening in different ways, OK? That’s how I work with the engineers. Now there’s listening assignments every week. They read a book called Audio Culture which has a lot of really good information from different composers and practitioners of various kinds. There’s a nice discography and bibliography so that each student is asked to listen to three pieces and then to write three sentences about each piece. A three-sentence review. By the end of the semester, these students write a final paper based on their journal and based on things that they’ve listened to, whatever. They can choose their own subject. Now, engineers often ask me, “Well, why do we have to listen to the noise pieces?” Then I have a lot of fun. I say, “Why don’t you guys go into your machine shop and make a recording?” Then I say, “What about the sound of New York City? Do you know who composed that?” I say, “You guys. You guys, you engineers, you’re the ones that have risen the noise level in New York City and other places so high,” so I said, “Why don’t you do some deep listening?” Audience Member Thank you. Audience Member Hello. Hi, thank you. I have a question about spirituality. Pauline Oliveros About what? Audience Member About spirituality. Pauline Oliveros Oh, OK. Audience Member I’ve always had part of myself, I’ve had intuition or an inclination towards the spiritual path. I’m also a musician. The deeper I got into making music, I tried to understand the relationship between music and spirituality for myself and it became a little more clear when I started doing a lot more drone-oriented music and just doing tonal listening, just a lot of long tones, a lot of just slow changing filters things like that. I’m wondering with you if you had an experience like that through your practice, as you got more into your music, did you form a spiritual path or a relationship with your music and how important is that to you? Pauline Oliveros For me, listening is a spiritual path because the more you listen, the more you learn and the more you’re able to put yourself in someone else’s position which is part of spirituality. That it’s not just about you. [applause] Thank you. Hanna Bächer I would like to say that it was a pleasure to listen to and listen with you, Pauline Oliveros. Thank you very much for coming here. Pauline Oliveros Thank you. [applause]