Most of us hear all day long and listen for only a few minutes of it. The fridge hums, traffic rolls past, a bird calls somewhere behind the house, and almost none of it reaches conscious attention.
The American composer Pauline Oliveros spent much of her life working in that gap. The name she eventually gave her answer to it, Deep Listening, has outlived her as a practice that musicians, sound artists, teachers and researchers still use.
This piece looks at where Deep Listening came from, what Oliveros meant by it, and how artists can put it to work in their own practice and research.
Who Pauline Oliveros was
Oliveros was born in Houston, Texas, on 30 May 1932 and died in Kingston, New York, on 24 November 2016. She took up the accordion at nine, and by sixteen she had decided to become a composer.
In the early 1960s she was one of the founding members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, alongside Ramón Sender and Morton Subotnick. When the centre moved to Mills College, she became its first director.
She moved to the University of California, San Diego, in 1967, and over her career also taught at Oberlin Conservatory and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1981 she left her tenured post at UCSD to work independently in upstate New York.
Through all of this she kept returning to one question. What happens when we pay full attention to sound, including the sounds we normally filter out?
The cistern where the term was born
In 1988 Oliveros, the trombonist Stuart Dempster and the vocalist and composer Panaiotis climbed down about 14 feet into an empty underground water cistern at Fort Worden, in Port Townsend, Washington, to make a recording.
The cistern held two million gallons when full, and it has a reverberation time of around 45 seconds. A single note hangs in the air long enough that the players had to listen to the space itself before deciding what to play next.
The recording was made on 8 October 1988, and Oliveros coined the term "deep listening" from that session. It was partly a pun on going deep underground. It quickly became something much larger, and the three musicians took it as the name of their group, the Deep Listening Band.
What deep listening actually means
Oliveros drew a clear line between hearing and listening. Hearing is the physical side: sound waves reaching the ear. Listening is what we do with what arrives, the act of giving it attention.
Deep listening asks for that attention to be as wide and as fine as possible at the same time. It was described as an aesthetic meant to help both trained and untrained performers practise listening and responding to their surroundings, alone or in a group.
Earlier writing on her work describes two modes she wanted people to hold together. One is focal attention, narrowing in on a single sound. The other is global awareness, taking in the whole field of sound at once.
Oliveros often represented these as a dot and a circle. The dot is the sound you are concentrating on, and the circle is everything around it, including your own body, your breathing and the room.
A short deep listening definition, then, might be this: a practice of listening to everything, all the time, while remaining aware of yourself listening. It is not a style of music. It is a way of attending that can be brought to any sound at all.
From Sonic Meditations to Deep Listening
The ideas did not appear out of nowhere in that cistern. In the early 1970s Oliveros had written her Sonic Meditations, a set of short text scores that anyone could perform.
They are instructions rather than notes on a stave. Some ask participants to make sounds, some to imagine them, some to listen to sounds happening now, and some to remember sounds from the past.
That fourfold scheme of making, imagining, listening and remembering fed directly into the later practice. The musicologist Heidi Von Gunden called this earlier body of thought "sonic awareness" and described it as combining the psychology of consciousness, the physiology of the martial arts and the sociology of the feminist movement.
The link to martial arts was real. At UCSD Oliveros studied karate with the physicist Lester Ingber, reached black belt level, and worked with him on how attention operates when we listen to music.
The book: A Composer's Sound Practice
In 2005 Oliveros published Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. It is the most direct way into her thinking, and it is less a theory book than a workbook.
It gathers exercises for the body, breathing and voice, listening practices for alone and in groups, and text pieces in the spirit of the Sonic Meditations. Many exercises are simple enough to do in a kitchen. Others are designed for retreats lasting several days.
Running through the book is the conviction that listening is a skill rather than a fixed ability. Practised with care, it can change how we relate to other people and to the places we live in.
Readers who expect a manual on composition are often surprised. There are no harmony rules here, only invitations to pay attention differently.
How the practice is taught today
Deep Listening began as a programme of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, founded in 1985. The foundation was renamed the Deep Listening Institute in 2005 and ran retreats in Europe, New Mexico and upstate New York, along with apprenticeship and certification programmes.
Today the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, looks after that legacy. It opened with a celebration concert at the university's EMPAC arts centre on 11 March 2015.
The workshop and certification tradition has carried on, and many musicians and teachers also adapt the exercises informally, with or without the name.
You will also come across other uses of the same phrase. Teachers in the tradition of the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh speak of deep listening as compassionate listening in conversation. It is a related idea, but it is not the same lineage as Oliveros's sonic practice.
A simple deep listening practice to try
You do not need a cistern to start. A quiet room, a park bench or a train carriage will do. What matters is the quality of attention.
Sit comfortably and close your eyes if that helps. For a few minutes, try to notice every sound you can, near and far, loud and faint, without labelling or judging them.
Then narrow down. Pick one sound and follow it closely: its texture, its rhythm, how it begins and ends. After a while, widen again and let that sound sit back inside the whole field.
Finish by noticing your own sounds, your breathing, your heartbeat if you can hear it, the small noises your body makes as you shift. Oliveros considered these part of what we listen to.
Done regularly, even this short exercise changes what you notice on the way home. Many people find the world suddenly sounds far more crowded and far more interesting.
Why it matters for artists and researchers
For sound artists the value is obvious. Many contemporary practices start from attention rather than composition, and Oliveros made attention itself the material. Our guide to field recording and how artists capture the sound of a place shows how close that work sits to her ideas.
The same applies to installation work. When a space is built for listeners rather than for objects, the visitor's attention becomes part of the piece, as in the projects described in our article on how sound installations shape a room.
For practice-based researchers, deep listening offers something useful as a method. It gives a repeatable, describable procedure for attending to a site, a material or a group, which can then be documented and reflected on.
That is exactly the kind of process that academic settings ask artists to make visible. It is no accident that institutions in the Nordic countries have taken listening seriously as a research method, as we explore in sound art as artistic research in Nordic institutions.
Where to start listening
The original Deep Listening album, recorded in the Fort Worden cistern, is still the best place to hear what Oliveros, Dempster and Panaiotis discovered. Listen on good headphones and let the long tails of each sound finish before you judge them.
After that, read A Composer's Sound Practice slowly, trying the exercises as you go rather than reading straight through.
Most of all, take the core idea with you. Listening is a skill, it can be practised, and the more of it you do, the more there turns out to be to hear.
About Dr. Mira Solheim
Dr. Mira Solheim is an art historian and writer focused on artistic research, Nordic visual culture and the intersection of art with technology and film. She writes for Artistic-Research.no on methodology, institutions and practice.