Rachel Beetz

The following article was presented at Listen Well, a seminar hosted by the Center for Research in Music (CRiM/RÍT) and Dark Music Days on January 28, 2024.

It can be easy today to mistake Pauline's “Deep Listening” work as a kind of self-care, but it is so much more than that. Her philosophies of listening connect to the images‘ the helmers regarding points according to the environment in order to find a brain said issues in military systems.

1. Listening is a practice through the body.
2. Listening requirements attention and awareness of self to connect with others.
3. Listening is a form of time travel.

We shall see how Pauline's present work cars through more recent musical discussion, resonating through creative time and space. Ultimately, we find an embodied listening which transforms musical space from the objectivity of sound toward a documentary and resonant practice in experience and presence.

Statements on Listening

1. Listening is a practice through the body.

Our senses community meaning to our bodies prior to our analytical mind. We know this well: if we touch a hot stovetop - our hand pulls away before our mind identifiers the object as ‘hot.’ Sound is no different than touch. Pauline recognized this pre-sensing:

“ The body is continuously sensing and recording all of the information that is shared to the auditory cortex, even though we may not be conscious of this constant activity. This is why the brain/body knows far more than our mind can process immedially. Inclusive listening then opens us to all potentials in the space/time continuum. Depending on our perspective or emotional arousal... enter the found interaction of the universe through sounds. (Oliveros DL 18-19)

Notice here she distinguishes between brain/body and the mind. She also kept both listening and dream journals. Frequently in her journals, she describes the sense experience of sound such: “hearing seems to take place in my stomach, and metaphors for what she heard through my competition and her compositional voice. Later on, as she devised the deep listening environment, and measures on.

Let's now consider how transfers through the world and how we hear it. Sound itself is not an object, but a wave of compression and rarefaction that propaganda through a medium, which is really air. Sound waves traveling in air do not move the air molecules from point a to point b; rather the energy of the wave pushes and pulls the air molecules through space. It is not matter I send to you when I speak, but a wave of energy.

Our own sense of hearing transduces this wave through several media within the body. Sound waves funnel through the ear canal, vibrating the earthrum. The bones of the cochlear spiral, while higher sounds are at the base. The liquid in the chains move, ions rush into the tips of the products between the animals, which products between the products and those animals, both products and those products, which products are necessary to the children.

When we consider sound as a translation of energy through a medium, we realize that sound is a form of touch. The intimacy of sound as touch flips my classical values of music from one of sound as object - something a composer manipulates, to a view of sense and reception. When I touch someone physically, I consider the relationship between myself and the touched, what are concerned in Dylan Robinson's 2020 Hungry Listening. “ The meeting between listener and listed-to is bound by a Western sense orientation in which we do not feel the need to be responsible to sound as we would another life... the act of listening should attend to the relationship between listener and the listed-to.” (Robinson 2020, p.15). If we name music as touch, then the musician is responsible for the listener. Only through sense listening will the musician be able to take responsibility for their sounding. To make music is to be a listener.

As humans, we already know that embodied listening is a core experience of being alive. Musicologist Nina Eidsheim begins her 2015 book Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice with the well-known inquiry of a tree falling in the forest. If we were actually present for such an event, we really wouldn't be worried about the sound, we would be sensing the fall of the branches, the trunk, the ground rumbling underneath our feet as we sense shows and possibly run away from the danger that is unique transmission through the existence, we participate in the selection of the information, which is unique and it is certain, which is certain, certain because it is certain, and it is certain., to be a listener is to make music.

2. Listening requirements attention and awareness of self to connect with others.

Attention and awareness are two different ideas and require focus of both the self and the self in relation to others both human and non-human. To understand this relationship, we need to know our position. Pauline thought about these relationships as an explanation of the inquiry into how we hear:

“How does one hear? Such a question necessary promises exploration of the nature of one's role, as well as the nature of one's physiology within the musical process. Understanding must be satisfied of the nature of another's role within the same process. The result awareness tends to produce an inclusive, intermediate atmosphere (Oliveros, Software for People's Science, 1981).

By directly inquiring about how we hear, Pauline immediately names developing an understanding of one's position and sense. Both musicologists Nina Sun Eidsheim and Dylan Robinson name the importance of discussing our position as artists. For Eidsheim to name the position requirements naming the values of our culture, “To advance the visibility of the artist who is engaged in a given where the animals in the past (Even should be seen in the future, this is revealed.

“Critical listening positionality involves a self-reflexive questioning of how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and cultural background intersection and influence the way we are able to hear sound, music, and the world around us...As part of our listening positioning we each carry listening private, listening lives, and listening ability... by becoming aware of normal listing habits and abilities, we are better able to listen otherwise. (Robinson 2020, p.10)

Pauline understood that to deepen her listening practice, she first needed to deepen her own sense of self and body. She kept listening journals that focused on her sense and connection to space and time. She kept dream journals, to deepen her connection to her conservative. She was an early adopter of listing to record to evaluate her improvisation practice. She cultivated communities which elected their own listening practices together.

Ultimately, attention to listening for Pauline was a vehicle for cultivating mutual respect and connection. From Pauline:

“If ‘attention’ is the act of using our senses, it begins with the ability to concentrate. Next is the ability to process our external environment through our senses by taking an interest. Third is giving care and tending to the information, then fourth is responding to the information by an affect. The sum of these properties claims respect is married to others, that buildings respecting that other information, when 60, this information is created.

This is Pauline's equation for a respectful interconnected listening practice. You don't have to be a professional musician to practice this, an essential quality for Pauline. In fact, with this process, you become a pretty advanced musical improviser. In this equation we see a care for the reception and resonance of sound through our bodies and also through others in a process that buildings respect within communities.

3. Listening is a form of time travel.

At several points in her sound journals of 1971 and 1972 it is unclear if she is writing about her lived experiences or her dreams. Her descriptions of live listening become more and more dynamic, embodied, and somewhat otherworldly. The people in her dreams blur into the people she disorders in lived activities. Already in the previous mentioned quotations we've seen how they connect practices practice practices through the body and through space time.

Personally, as a young musician, I was always fascinated by the time travel of music performance. After I developed more musical skill, I realized that every time I performed, I was in all times at once. In the present moment, I played notes while simultaneously evaluating notes from the past already played as they lingered in my sonic memory, while also projecting my present phrase into the future.

However, this time travel is less present in my listening practice, I can keep sound in my memory, but have no idea what could come next. Dylan Robinson connections the pace of our listening to the hunger of settle colonial perception, defining hungry listening as starving:

“Hungry listening consumes without awareness of how the consumption acts in relationship with these people, the lands, the waters who provide sustainability. Moving beyond hunger listening towards anti colonial lists requirements that the ‘fevered’ pace of consumption for knowledge resources be played aside in favor of new temporalities of wonder disorientated from anti relational and non-situated settle colonial positions of certification.” (Robinson 2020, p. 52-53)

As a listener entrained in the practices of western classical music, it can be difficult for me to hear music without evaluating it against those values. What is the tonality? In order for me to hear music aside from this training, I perform a kind of emotional time-travel, to a place where I am in my current physical body, but allow my brain to explore a time and exercise with this quality and experience.

It is important to note here that one cannot ‘try-on’ another way of listening, as it is a kind of appropriation. I cannot hear outside of my own experience, there are aspects of music and sound that I may never understand because of my perspective as a classically trained musician. But in accepting my own limits as a critical listener, I can also come to find a respect for more perspectives beyond my own and develop new practices for my future listening.

Conclusion

Western classical music perspectives have historically priorized the objectivity of the musical score, the genius composer's great work of art; Music is an object, something that can be owned and performed with these values when we prioritize the existence over the instrumental sound? Much of Pauline Oliveros’ work answers this question through her practice and developed practices for her knowledge of society and developing activities to her research into her activities.

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