Deep listening

On 7 October 1988, three musicians - Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Paniotis - descended into a hole in the ground near Seattle.  The hole led to an old cistern which once held two million gallons of water.  Empty, it offered a huge pancake-shaped space 14 feet high and nearly 95 feet in radius.  Two properties made it attractive to the musicians: its extraordinarily long reverberation time of 45 seconds - the time for which a played sound lingers on in reflections - and the smoothness of that reverberation; sounds came back as an enveloping presence, unlocated, their spatial information blurred by the huge echo chamber which seemed to rob notes of their origin, and lend them instead a total ghostly presence throughout the void.

The instruments used were limited; trombone, accordion, didgeridoo, voices and whistling.  The three musicians improvised, reacting to each other and to the cistern's returned sounds. The result was called 'Deep Listening'. 

Deep listening because of the musicians' literal depth inside a mountain.  A perfect recording space, it was devoid of all other noises apart from that of the music.  It therefore naturally encouraged that sense of concentrated listening born of complete isolation, where everything else, where the rest of the world, had been stripped away, leaving only the sounds.
 
Deep listening because in this intensely aware environment, the musicians had to respond to a complex and unique aural experience.  They had literally never heard this kind of sound before; to improvise within it required a new concentration and dedication.  The nature of the space and its effects on the music also determined that the players had to listen for different things; for the constantly lapping layers of sound, returned sound, and its return, and so on almost endlessly.  Their sense of sound became extended over time: a note was not a point but a line, an area.

Deep listening because the circumstances of the improvisation inevitably engendered a sense of seriousness, of a hieratic process that in turn demanded the deepest kind of response.  The purity of the silence could obviously only be broken by sounds and harmonies of a requisite simplicity and grandeur.  Just as the cistern leached out from sounds all corporeal characteristics such as position, so it seemed to be an antidote to triviality, to anything but the largest and most ambitious thoughts made manifest in music.

Deep listening too because the space became an active player in the process; the other musicians were clearly responding as much to its inflections of their earlier sounds as to each other.  This sense of the space's participation led naturally to one of the space listening, of the huge cavern engaged in a deep communion with the improvisers, one absolutely necessary to marry its sounds with their sounds with past sounds and to prepare for future ones.  It suggested that the mountain, the earth itself was attentive, participating.

Deep listening indeed. 

(2.1.90)

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