Latest Pauline Oliveros Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• People's experiences are all different, and you don't know what the person experienced. They know, but you don't, so I think it's important to listen carefully to what a person has to say. And not to force them into any direction at all but simply to model what you've experienced, model it and also be what I call a Listening Presence. If you're really listening, then some of the barriers can dissolve or change.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Thinking, People, Listening

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• It takes time because the habitual response to that is very deep. It goes back to our earliest responses as babies. You have to feel safe, and if a sound is threatening, you're going to be upset. There are those early responses, depending on how and what kind of experiences you had.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Baby, Upset, Sound

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I'm currently very impressed with the level of understanding and of interest in listening that I experience wherever I go. That motivates me to dig deeper into what I've been doing all of this time, to find new ways and also to get over the thought that it's not happening.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Understanding, Listening, Way

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• The sound that I play is delayed, it's modified, and it's modulated. It's an intelligent system; it's happening now.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Intelligent, Play, Sound

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• You invent things like algorithms to take care of some of the changes you want to make. The changes aren't detectable. There's all kinds of things happening as I play.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Play, Algorithms, Care

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Pauline Oliveros

  Keyboards, Instruments, Mice

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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!" .

  Pauline Oliveros

  Mean, Hands, Buttons

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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].

  Pauline Oliveros

  Talking, Numbers, Hands

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated; it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Sound, Delay, Feeding

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Computer, Instruments, Transfers

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• I had a lot of good times. I had a lot of fun. I liked what I was doing, so I just kept doing it. At the Tape Music Center, I was working from midnight to four in the morning. Because then it was quiet, nobody was there, and I could just do my work. I didn't have to fool around.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Morning, Fun, Fool

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• My first tape piece was made with that Sears Roebuck recorder. I modified sound using cardboard tubes with a microphone in the end to filter the sound. I had a wooden apple box with a Piezo [contact] mic and little objects that I could amplify on the box. I used the bathtub for reverberation.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Apples, Pieces, Amplify

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Pauline Oliveros

  Tape

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Long, Track, Delay

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Trying, Different, Purpose

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• When we had the San Francisco Tape Music Center, we had a couple of Ampex tape machines there, and I could string tape from one machine, past the heads, and over to the next machine to the supply-reel amp, and have another delay there.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Couple, Past, San Francisco

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Distance, Echoes, Play

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• Maybe I'll start from the initial idea, what motivated me to do that. In 1953, I had access to a tape recorder. Tape recorders were not widely available. There was no cassette tape back then. It was a Sears Roebuck tape machine. I put a microphone in the window and recorded the ambience.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Ideas, Tape, Machines

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• We have a very large constituency in the world from all of the years that we've done workshops, retreats, and talks. I would say there a few thousand people out there that have some relationship to what we do.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Years, People, Retreat

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• The mission [of institution] won't change. It will continue to be what it is: to spread the practice of deep listening and introduce it to people, to do workshops and retreats and certification programs and so on.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Practice, People, Listening

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• In my Deep Listening class at RPI, I always do an hour of energy exercises to start with. Then we do a listening meditation after that, after the body has been loosened up and warmed up and is ready. We do the listening. After that, there's the journaling of the experience, which they do each time throughout the semester to the point that I have them write a final paper on what they've experienced.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Writing, Exercise, Class

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• It's going to take about a year or two for the transfer to be completed. We have a certification program so professionals can teach deep listening.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Years, Two, Listening

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• 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.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Years, Listening, Twenties

  Source: www.artpractical.com

• [Students] they did the sonic meditations, I would observe them in their ensembles, and the ensembles improved incredibly. So I knew I had something to do and something to say.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Meditation, Ensemble, Students

  Source: www.artpractical.com

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

  Pauline Oliveros

  Missing, Listening, Ensemble

  Source: www.artpractical.com