Pauline Oliveros with Goddard in the Dan Harpole Cistern

In this video people, namely Pauline Oliveros and others, can be seen – and mainly heard – playing their instruments and using their voices to create sound that has vibrations and acoustics which are on a different level than those one normally hears in concert halls and elsewhere. The reverberation is long, so much longer than the reverberation of a key played on a piano in typical concert hall. Possibly ten times as long. The acoustics in the cistern (the place they are playing their instruments in) is unique. One can assume that that is one of the places where man-made sounds are the most intensely reverberated anywhere on the planet. This sort of reverberation does not happen in churches, for example. It might be similar in other, natural, places such as underground caves. At the same time, nature will probably not provide a place with such perfect symmetry to vibrate sound in.

        Music sounds different in different spaces. There is the difference of the same music sounding differently depending on its being played in a room with a lower ceiling as opposed to a concert hall. As sound moves in waves, these waves have a different flow in different spaces. For example, a friend of mine is very particular as to where to sit during a concert at the Alte Oper because only certain rows and positions have the best acoustics. Therefore, when she can not get hold of a ticket for any of her preferred rows, she will refrain from buying the ticket altogether. To my uninitiated ear, music sounds the same wherever I sit in any concert hall. Another example is how the music coming out of one's phone sounds fuller, more vibrant when put in a pot as opposed to merely sitting on the desk – even I recognise the difference. But not only that. Sound is different depending on other factors as well, such as a venue's content of humidity.
        Pauline Oliveros knows of the elements of nature that contribute to the change in sound. Not only does she perform with these elements very much in her mind, she uses them to create her singular way of performance. By, for example, performing inside a 14 feet deep cistern. In this use of the available spaces she is very much like John Cage who uses available items for his performances. While Cage is enveloped by the sounds he produces with those everyday items, she envelopes herself with the sounds she produces within a certain space.
        Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening. By that she means listening to everything all the time. Not only to sounds that are deliberately produced in the form of music or speech but also to all the sounds encompassing us in every day life such as nature's sounds like rain and wind but also the sledgehammer at a construction site, the sound a tyre does on the road. Even going so far as to include the sound of one's thinking. Deep Listening means to learn how to “expand the perception of sound to include time space continuum and countering the wasteness and complexities as much as possible. Simultaneously targeting a sound and perceiving its beginning, middle and end” (Difference). Not all of the sounds one hears make immediate sense. Some take a while, some we will never understand. The aim is to listen to the sound, to think about it. She came to this conclusion through her experience in the cistern. From that place she has learnt to listen to the spaces surrounding her. They, together with instruments and voices make each and every space unique. In a way, Deep Listening is a form of reverse meditation. Instead of emptying one's mind, the aim is to letting in all the sounds one usually blends out.
        I do not wonder that her work has inspired New Age music. The sounds she produces are eerie, otherworldly. I tried and failed to watch the video in the evening, I had to stop it and watch it in daylight as I am easily creeped out by darkness paired with eerie sounds. It is very much something I would not go for.