deep listenings, attunements, and ears
week 23
Pauline Oliveros articulates her method and practice of “Deep Listening” as the expansiveness of the experience of paying attention through DL. The structure of the book Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, which is part artist statement, part scores, and part meditations, mimics this expansiveness in that for Oliveros, DL is a means through which she makes work while engaging with others through a community-driven sensibility. DL relates the inner sounds to external sounds in a spatial and temporal continuum. It is a natural way of being in the world while building on this interconnectedness to develop listening as a practice.
In Oliveros’ practice, listening takes on two interlinked meanings: The first is through “deep listening,” which as a practice interweaves personal and social consciousness, a meditative practice that requires meditative, mindful engagement with the world. The second is her expansion of time and material by manipulating recording and playback technologies. She becomes a listener who responds, which is an extension of listening, implicating her subject in the act of listening. She becomes an implicated listener, underscoring the transformative potential/energy of listening as a practice.
One of the most important aspects of this book is that it provides the tenets of Oliveros’s work while situating this method as a practice that can be applied in different times and places without a mediator. As such, the book proposes that everyone is a composer, and deep listening is a practice that only requires time. Listening is thus de-specialized and integrated into the quotidian, presenting attunement and attentiveness as modalities that can be embodied.
Oliveros’s term inclusive listening is an articulation of the expansiveness of time and space that can be opened up through listening; Oliveros’s listenings are ongoing processes of transformation that changes Oliveros as well as those who are listening with her, which serves to position listening as knowledge-production in progress. Her emphasis on listening being a life-long act and its expansiveness, as she says, “Listening is very diverse and takes many different forms as cultures take many different forms,” positions listening as an amorphous and expansive space. The practice of deep listening implies both taking in and responding, melding the before and the after of a sound event together.
Oliveros’s Ear Piece (1998) is a crucial intervention in the assumed human experience of listening as a wilful act. The work comprises thirteen questions, the first of which is “Are you listening now?” The engagement of the question with the moment produces an inherent dissonance: Is the interlocutor asking whether the subject of the interview is listening to them or their environment? Further on, questions of “Are you listening while you are hearing?” and “Do you hear yourself in your daily life?” further accentuate the production of the interviewed subject, probing them to be self-reflective in what constitutes hearing and listening while remembering and reconsidering how they move through daily life. The last (and perhaps concluding) question is: “What sound is most meaningful to you?” The questions engage with listening and hearing, sounds and memories of sounds, ears, and meanings, the before and during of the questions, to create moments of dissonance between the temporalities of sound and the constitution of the interviewed subject.
Oliveros’s insistence that the interviewer asks the questions in their native language and her recording of the questions and answers together with the ambiances that she imagines edited in a “mix down” re-produces the conditions of the original interview: as the subject of the interview moved in and out of listening, hearing, answering, articulating, remembering, the recorded interview includes layers of articulation and ambiance, which are then reorganized to create another sound event that blurs the boundaries between the subjects and their environments. Languages are spliced, as verbal articulations become objects that are removed from what we associate with the goal of an interview, which is to know more about the subject. The subject becomes a tool with which we are in tune with the ambiance through their answers to the questions verbally and through the very recording that Oliveros makes, thus implicating the listener. The “Ear Piece” produces an ear out of the listener that is every ear in its dissonant yet anchored attunement.