| As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of synchronization, coordination, release, and change. Hearing represents the primary sense organ—hearing happens involuntarily. Our ears are always receiving, whether or not we are aware of it. Listening is a voluntary process that occurs after the process of hearing takes place. Listening is delayed and comes after evoked potentials in the brain. We can choose to listen or not. Listening takes place in the audio cortex and develops throughout our lifetime through experience and training. It takes many listeners and consensus to produce musical culture. All cultures or communities develop and change through ways of listening. Deep Listening® is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing | 
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Pauline Oliveros
Performance in Switzerland. Photo credit: Terry Meier. Courtesy of the artist.As a musician, I am interested in the sensual nature of sound, its power of synchronization, coordination, release, and change. Hearing represents the primary sense organ—hearing happens involuntarily. Our ears are always receiving, whether or not we are aware of it. Listening is a voluntary process that occurs after the process of hearing takes place. Listening is delayed and comes after evoked potentials in the brain. We can choose to listen or not. Listening takes place in the audio cortex and develops throughout our lifetime through experience and training. It takes many listeners and consensus to produce musical culture. All cultures or communities develop and change through ways of listening.
Deep Listening® is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one’s own thoughts, as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening® is the experience of heightening awareness through full-bodied and complete attention. Deep Listening® connects to all that there is. As a composer I want to make my music through Deep Listening®.
I remind myself to listen so that I may be here now even though now has already gone.
Why does listening matter to me? I am a musician—a composer/improviser engaging with sound, form, and technology. Technology is enabling me to hear more and do more with what I hear through my listening. I am interested because I might want to use the sounds that may be discovered that are ordinarily out of range. Technology has disembodied sound, and yet now we are absorbing technology back into the body and may find ourselves distant or even close cousins to intelligent robotic forms in the future. I am interested in how robots will hear and listen and make music. Will I be able to engage with them? Play with them? Hear and understand the music? Feel something?
Listening is an active engagement with what is heard. It is simultaneously memory. Will I remember to remember? Is listening ever direct? Or is listening always a reflection reminding us that we are human?
