Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations



Who is she and what were her key thoughts?

A queer feminist sound artist, and sound theorist. She taught at the University of California San Diego. She made a distinction between listening and hearing. She understood hearing as the physical process that is passive whereas listening is an active psychological process which requires awareness [ of surroundings, of others]. Her Sonic Meditations are the main area of study for my project. These take the form of a musical score comprised of a set of written instructions directed towards group listening activities. They are a series of instructions for various activities; imagining, listening, mimicking, described as a ‘software for the people’.



How she figures in my work?

My project aims to break down individualistic conceptions of breathing to reveal the communal, intergenerational, and spiritual dimensions of breath. The Sonic Meditations aim for participants to engage with communal breathing. In sonic meditations the environment becomes a source of intersubjective experience. So, these could be a generative site for my project.



Which sonic meditations I’ve selected: 1,3,4,8,10







Last night me Gaz Molly and Alice tried out three of these meditations that I had selected for their relevance to this project; I,III,X [Teach Yourself To Fly, Pacific Tell, and number 10]. I chose to do these meditations as they are all actively group exercises that aim for intersubjectivity. We did these exercises for an hour and a half or so, after dinner, at about 10 on a easter Friday. We had just eaten a warming peanut stew with mackerel and on the side had made crispy plantains in a lime-pickled onions and some slimy soy okra [or bhindi for Vid]. Gaz had been planning this meal for a little while and was excited to see her thought turn into substance. Our whole house had been indulging each other through our evening meals throughout quarantine and this generally leaves us crawling to bed after our dinner with a full stomach that can only do with resting. Last night we were all pleased to try out a relaxing meditation [bar Vid who was on the phone to his friends from Liverpool but had kindly lent us his room to try out these meditations in].

We sat in a circle, a glowing amber lamp in the corner filling the room with soft light, and read through the instructions. I had briefly talked to everyone about Pauline Oliveros and so we were reasonably prepared.  We started with “Teach Yourself to Fly” in which you have to observe, observe yourbreathing, observe our breathing.  Then we observe the transformation of our breathing slowly into audibility and then into a tone. Then finally observe our breathing return to quiet. This was great as a warm up exercise as it slowly made us use our vocal chords in direct connection to our breathing. I’m unsure how long this took but we smoothly proceeded through all these stages together and arrived back to silence together.

We agreed that even after this first session group relaxation exercise were welcome in a stressful week in which we’ve seen multiple hazmat suits and ambulances outside our window. I found it difficult to slowly engage my vocal chords and stuttered slightly while Alice felt she had been overly forceful with her vocal tone. All of us felt quite calm throughout this and found it easy to focus on our breath. We thought that it may have been the collectivity of this activity combined with the unusual quiet on our street.

         Pacific tell was our next meditation which required us to form a sound image in our mind and then telepathically transport it to someone else’s mind before clearing our mind and then waiting for a new image to come to mind. If one did, then we had to sound out this image. We had a discussion about what a sound image was, or could be. Are they sonic events, like a door closing or bacon frying, or are they musical structure like a series of chords, or soundscapes more generally which come with more depth and context. It was agreed that its fairly open as long as you were imagining the actual shape of the sound and not just the pictorial image, the vibration of the air not its visual representation.

This meditation was often comical, even with closed eyes we could feel each other trying to beam sound thoughts into each other’s skulls. I laughed to myself while trying to be telepathic as it brought on a strong memory of re-enacting superhero’s with my brother. Alice was the first to get a sound image and started popping followed quickly by Gaz singing a song about authors? I think and then Molly making the whir of a car. I sounded out a light repetitive plopping before short bouts of laughter from the oddness of our current soundscape. We finished in relaxed group laughter. This one was less calming, and we felt less meditative, but everyone had enjoyed it, Alice especially.

The next meditation asked us to Respond to the sound around us and then to try to reinforce the sound. We did this in the complete dark which relaxed us after the previous meditation. It was actually reasonably quiet around so we struggled slight to find sounds to reinforce apart from a couple of gurgling sounds in the corner of the room. This meditation faded out slowly because of this.

Finally we practiced X, communally agreed as the most connecting and calming. This meditation starts in the same was as the previous two, by observing your own breath. [I liked this as a way to start] We then tried to take another person in the room into our minds eye before singing a tone to them, then we had to adjust our tone to be the tone that person was singing. This meditation slowly ramped up in speed as we began mainly responding rather than pausing in between choice of person. We began to create nice chords and harmonies.

After, we sat and reflected on the meditations in the dark. We enjoyed the dark as it allowed us to be calm.





Response:
I’d like to progress some of these experiences onwards, particularly the communal singing in X where we put someone else’s image into our mind and then sang to them. This process created a trance inducing state that was constantly shifting but always finding harmonies and places of rest. The downside of these meditations was that they feel rooted in the immediate present, with little intergenerational thought and little thought beyond the room they’re in. How would these meditations develop if you had to breathe through the lungs of someone else? Or try to sing with someone who wasn’t immediately with you? These are some of the ideas I’d like to progress with in my work.