Deep Listening
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A meditative practice-music built from long sustained tones, extreme natural reverberation and improvised interaction, in which accordion, trombone, conch, didjeridu and wordless voice bloom into slowly beating overtone clouds. Tempo is effectively absent; pieces breathe on the scale of minutes as performers listen inward and outward at once, letting the acoustic space itself become an instrument. Production favours real reverberant sites over studio effects, so recordings often carry cavernous decay tails of many seconds. The mood is contemplative, spacious and consciously non-narrative, aimed at heightening the listener's awareness of sound as much as delivering melody.
History
The practice was formalised by composer-accordionist Pauline Oliveros, whose decades of sonic-awareness exercises crystallised in 1988 when she, trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis descended fourteen feet into a two-million-gallon cistern at Fort Worden, Washington, whose forty-five-second reverberation shaped the landmark 1989 New Albion album Deep Listening. The trio's success led Oliveros to found the Deep Listening Band and the Deep Listening Institute, codifying meditation, dream-work and bodywork alongside improvisation. The lineage draws on Oliveros's earlier tape and accordion works and on the American experimental tradition of Cage and Cardew, and it fed forward into installation sound, sound-healing and the wider drone-ambient world; the term and pedagogy remain in active use by ensembles and universities worldwide.
Defining artists
Essential listening
Sources
- Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (2005)
- New Albion Records liner notes to Deep Listening (1989)
- David Toop, Ocean of Sound (1995)