[93.1] THE SOUND OF SIRENS

Deep Listening is an educational venture of the Pauline Oliveros Foundation. It involves a range of creative programmes and projects, like 'Lunar Opera' and the participatory 'Through the Millennium', based on electronic, through-composed and improvisatory music. The philosophy is couched in terms that can come across as rather off-puttingly 'new agey' and repetitive, but the sound sources are not at all bland or soporific. 'Dream Time' (7' 35") from the 1995 'Tosca Salad' CD is drone based, ambient, but also angular, occasionally dissonant and multi-perspectival. The remarkable, tenacious, 70-year-old Oliveros' own site includes a biography and interview, free scores, MP3s, articles and archives. Check out the composer's catalogue here.

"Everyone with healthy ears can hear. Listening takes cultivation and evolves through one's lifetime. Listening is noticing and directing attention and interpreting what is heard. Deep Listening is exploring the relationship among any and all sounds. Hearing is passive. We can hear without listening. This is the state of being tuned out - unaware of our acoustic ecology ... We hear in order to listen. We listen in order to interpret ourselves and our world." (c) Pauline Oliveros