Deep (Imaginative) Listening

In last week’s class, we talked about Pauline Oliveros and Deep Listening. We listened to ‘Deep Listening’, the first album of the Deep Listening band (featuring Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaiotis), recorded in a cavernous underground cistern in Washington State. We also did some Deep Listening of our own, including a short improvisation together based on transforming sounds that we could hear in the room. 

In the discussion after our improvised listening/sounding piece, the idea of ‘imaginative listening’ came up. This is an idea closely linked to what Katharine Norman, in ‘Sounding Art: Eight Literary ExcursionsThrough Electronic Music’ describes as “imaginative making up.” It is a process in which composers must bridge the gap between sounds heard and remembered, and sounds transformed into music. Initial inspiration and its creative outcome have to be stitched together and listening, paired with imagination, makes this possible.

In our improvisation, we were listening for sounds and transforming them – augmenting, magnifying, stretching, shifting…The tiniest ping of the radiator became a loud hissing of sharp inhaled breath; a soprano practicing on the floor above us became a multi-layered droning hum, shared among several performers, slowly climbing higher in pitch.

What I realized was that listening INTO a sound creates all kinds of space for transformation. Through this listening, the “resourcefulness” of a sound (that is, its ability to be a resource to us, as composers, artists, creators) is revealed. But we have to engage with imaginative listening to make this happen. Deep Listening is a point of access for this kind of imaginative listening. As with soundwalks, the focus on listening engages both the body AND the mind. The work of deep listening is kinetic, active and continuous, but also open-ended and far ranging. I think this is one reason I am drawn to the practice of Deep Listening. I find it especially useful in the context of mapping sensory and perceptual experiences to creative practices, which is exactly what we're trying to do in this class…Deep Listening can serve as a creative end, in and of itself, as well as a way to get at more.