"Tuning In": Sound Perception and Embodiment for Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) is a composer of electronic and experimental music that significantly impacted how we approach music as participants and scholars. Utilizing nontraditional forms of composition, her trailblazing Sonic Meditations (1971) adapted elements of the emerging somatics movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and invited the intuitive body into music performance and experience—ultimately opening the door for the “new musicologists” of the 1990s to actively accept bodily responses as a part of the music, as claimed by musicologist John Kapusta. Simultaneously, Oliveros used the somatic practices she learned, Kinetic Awareness and Tai Chi, to guide her relationship with listening and the eventual development of her practice, Deep Listening, whose name she coined in 1989. This thesis (1) traces consciousness, attention, and awareness specifically to document how these human states-of-being inform her mature definitions of hearing and listening; (2) highlights, from a historiographic position, Oliveros’ use of somatic movement principles; and (3) dialogues and reassess the frameworks that leading musicologists such as Kapusta have recently advanced in relation to Oliveros. All in all, in this thesis I posit that Pauline Oliveros is a foundational figure to the field of Sound Studies, and that her practice of Deep Listening reorients listening as a fully embodied experience, predating R. Murray Schafer’s groundbreaking work The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World in 1994.
Oliveros, listening, hearing, embodiment, somatics, meditation, attention, awareness, sound studies
Plummer, B. (2024). "Tuning in": Sound perception and embodiment for Pauline Oliveros [Master's thesis, Texas State University].
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