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Listening Report on Pauline Oliveros with Goddard in the Dan Harpole Cistern

 Sarah Kumar

Dr. Bernd Herzogenrath

The Future of (American) Music

05 Mar. 2023

Listening Report on Pauline Oliveros with Goddard in the Dan Harpole Cistern

            The video starts with people climbing up a ladder in a hollowed room. The voices of the people that are there are echoing off the walls, creating sound that reverberates around off the walls. The sounds of the people inside the room are almost like an intro for the person that starts singing about halfway in the video. Almost every movement that is made, every laugh, makes sound. A third into the video, someone is making a melody with their voice, using their own echo to play off of. In the Dan Harpole Cistern, the sounds of people – their movements, laughter, singing – can travel for hundreds of meters, which is why it takes so long for them to arrive and creates the effect of there being more voices than there are when that person sang.

            According to the Center for Deep Listening, “Deep Listening … explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening,” something that is observable in the video clip of the Dan Harpole Cistern (“About Deep Listening”). What might not sound like music at first as it has no real pattern or rhythm is still considered to be sound, and sound is something that can be experimented with endlessly since the whole world is full of it. By experimenting with different types of sound, like it is done in the Dan Harpole Cistern, one can gain a deeper insight of the world inside and outside of themselves.

            As John Cage said, “[t]there’s no such thing as silence,” meaning that even if the outside world were to be completely quiet, our bodies would still produce sound such as the blood rushing through our veins, our breathing, or vibrations of our movements making us able to feel sound, to a certain degree (“Lecture Slides” 21). All of these ways to produce and listen to sound – that is, the sound we actively choose to listen to and the sound we do not actively listen to – open up endless possibilities to create new modes of listening. I think that by listening deeper, such as to the voices that are traveling those long meters in the Dan Harpole Cistern, sound can be more creatively, and most importantly freely, used to produce music, taking inspiration from what is around and inside us.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

“About Deep Listening.” The Center for Deep Listening, www.deeplistening.rpi.edu/deep-listening/. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.

Herzogenrath, Bernd. “Lecture Slides: Cage & Lucier.” Google Drive – Reader FUTURE OF MUSIC, 30 Nov. 2023, https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZBuycx655KES2p8U5KB9XSjZuE_q-6DV/edit#slide=id.p21. Accessed 5 Mar. 2023.
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