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Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice.

Article Excerpt
Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. By Pauline Oliveros. New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005. [128 p. ISBN 0595343651. $13.95.]

Before you read beyond this first paragraph, take four or five minutes to do this simple exercise: stop and listen. What do you hear? What is the most distant sound you can hear? The closest? The most vivid and the most subtle? Can you relax and just take in the whole soundscape? How do you feel after doing this? Has anything changed?

You will not be able to understand the power of Pauline Oliveros's important new book, unless you take time to experience and practice different ways of listening, for this book contains a series of invitations to explore the world and ourselves through sound and silence. It is also an initiation in the practice Oliveros calls "Deep Listening." One should enter this book with caution, because, if you are willing to explore experientially what it offers, it could well change your life.

If one's hearing is healthy, listening seems as natural as breathing, since we are embedded in a sonorous world, with sound waves washing over and through us constantly. Yet "listening" is very different from merely hearing. If you need proof of this assertion, just stop reading again and listen. (You may wonder who turned up the volume!) Directing attention toward auditory perception can transform an ordinary din into an aesthetic experience, as John Cage's 4'33" invites us to do. Awakening to the transformative power of perception takes practice, and as we practice, our listening and the quality of our experience seems to deepen, and with it the quality of our lives. For Pauline Oliveros, listening has been her life-long practice, and her new book offers a culmination of her experience and teaching in this realm.

That Oliveros has been a major figure in the field of experimental music as composer, performer, teacher, and writer hardly needs mention. She has to her credit an impressive catalogue...