Skip to Content

Research Collaborator

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Pauline Oliveros is one of America's most vital composers, performers, and humanitarians. Deep Listening®, her lifetime practice, merges environmental sounds into musical performance through listening. Her research includes a forty-year development of the Expanded Instrument System – a digital improvisation environment for acoustic instrument processing; numerous improvisation ensembles; and continuous research on the generation of creative work from listening. She has served as Darius Milhaud artist-in-residence at Mills College and as president of Deep Listening Institute. In 1989, she received an honorary Doctor of Music from the University of Maryland and also from Mills College in 2005. She holds an honours BA in music composition from San Francisco State College.

...the innovative working models of improvisation developed by creative practitioners have helped to promote a dynamic exchange of cultural forms, and to encourage new, socially responsive forms of community building across national, cultural, and artistic boundaries.

– Ajay Heble