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Fw: Wired: 50 Years Melding Tech and Sounds



----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenny L" <xxx@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <kluong@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2003 6:45 PM
Subject: Wired: 50 Years Melding Tech and Sounds

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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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> 50 Years Melding Tech and Sounds
>
> http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,58042,00.html
>
> By Katie Dean
>
> As a young girl, Pauline Oliveros was fascinated with the crackly sound of
her grandfather's crystal radio and the whistles and pops of her father's
shortwave.
>
> It was this early interest in the technology and the sounds it produced
that led the musician to experiment with electronic music.
>
> The 70-year-old Oliveros will debut her latest piece, Sound Geometries,
commissioned by l'Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles, at the international Ars
Musica Festival in Brussels on Saturday.
>
> "When I got my first tape recorder in 1953, I put the microphone in my
window and I started to record," said Oliveros, who teaches at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute and runs a nonprofit organization that supports
artists and musicians.
>
> The experience challenged her to become more aware of the sounds around
her, she said. The practice of intense listening at all times has become the
basis of her philosophy, called Deep Listening.
>
> "It's actually how much music emerges," she said. "From the listening and
being in that heightened state of consciousness."
>
> While electronic music seems fairly new as a genre, Oliveros has been
exploring the medium for 50 years.
>
> In 1961, she helped found the San Francisco Tape Music Center, one of the
first electronic tape facilities in the country, which is now the Center for
Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland. At the University of
California at San Diego, Oliveros established one of the first electronic
music programs in the country.
>
> Audio
>
> Hear Pauline's band perform a song using sounds from deep underground.
>
> Her latest piece, written for a 13-piece chamber orchestra, combines the
sounds of the ensemble with Oliveros' Expanded Instrument System, a sort of
sound "time machine," as she calls it. While the musicians play in the
present, the acoustic sounds are recorded on the computer and played a few
seconds later in the piece. Oliveros says it's a sound-processing method
that expands time in both directions: into the past and into the future.
>
> In Sound Geometries the music is modified to send sounds to the speakers
in auditory geometric patterns.
>
> "You hear the sounds moving and the patterns changing and the rates of
speed changing," Oliveros said. "You'll hear the acoustic sound of the
ensemble and the reflected sounds flying around in space."
>
> She's been developing her Expanded Instrument System for 30 years.
>
> "When it first developed it was analog, and I used two or more tape
machines," she said. "I recorded on tape and then sent the playback from the
second machine into the first machine in various ways. It would give you
some loops and modifications, but it's not as flexible as what you can do
today with the computer.
>
> "Now with the marriage of recording and computing, it's possible to record
and edit and manipulate sounds in a very amazing way," Oliveros said. "I've
been privileged to experience all this development."
>
> Norman Lowrey, a composer and chairman of the music department at Drew
University has studied with Oliveros and followed her career for several
decades.
>
> "She struck me from the first meeting as someone who was very interesting
and doing very provocative work," Lowrey said. "I think she's one of the
most important, original composers of the 20th and now 21st centuries. She
is comparable in many ways to John Cage."
>
> Oliveros' performances are notable for the way she tunes into and
interacts with the environment she's performing in. She has played her
accordion in caves and at the bottom of a 200-foot cistern on a military
base.
>
> "The resulting music she creates comes directly out of the acoustic
characteristics of that place," Lowrey said. "That includes the people who
are there as factors in shaping the acoustics."
>
> Wilma Salisbury, a music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, has been
reviewing Oliveros' work for about 25 years and describes it as soothing and
meditative.
>
> "She was a real pioneer in developing electronic music way back when it
was something really new," Salisbury said. "She gets a lot of credit for
that.
>
> "She makes people listen to music in a different way. You find yourself
listening to the air conditioning, the rain, the traffic."
>
> Oliveros said the growing interest in using technology to manipulate
sounds -- especially in popular music -- has created a new audience for her.
>
> "Right now it's the young people who are most interested in my work, it
seems," Oliveros said. "I feel really wonderful about that. That's very
gratifying after years of being somewhat marginalized."
>
>
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