Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication Studies

Faculty/School

Faculty of Arts

First Advisor

Andrew Herman

Advisor Role

Supervisor

Second Advisor

Colleen Daniher

Advisor Role

Second Reader

Third Advisor

Deanna Yerichuk

Advisor Role

Third Reader

Abstract

Pauline Oliveros, renowned lesbian composer, left a legacy of experimental music and groundbreaking ideas about music and sound, both as maker and listener. She is best known for her concept of Deep Listening, the active engagement of listening to sound and being open to all possibilities, being receptive to the resonant currents emanating from the sounds, to go beyond hearing and to listen, to Deeply Listen, to the sounds, to experience fully those sounds. Deep Listening was inspired by an experience Oliveros had in a cistern in 1988, where beneath the earth she truly experienced listening and the sounds present there as more than just something to hear. By playing with the cistern and the sounds present, Oliveros engaged herself fully in the practice of listening, of Deep Listening, going beyond merely hearing. She responded to the sounds, which shaped her. In turn, she by her unique identity of being her, with all her lived experience, shaped her listening experience. Each listening experience is specific and unique to the listener, and to the specific moment of listening, with all that each listener is and all that each space is contributing to the uniqueness of that listening experience.

In this autoethnographic thesis, I Deeply Listen to Oliveros’ 1990 album Troglodyte’s Delight. Recorded two years after her cistern epiphany, Troglodyte’s Delight is Oliveros exploring Deep Listening and playing as a response to natural sounds, as the album was recorded in a cave in New York State, underground, with water dripping in the cavern and Oliveros’ accordion music being shaped by the crevasses and walls of the cave. Through Deeply Listening to the album, my queer identity meets, is shaped by, and interacts with Oliveros’, through a process of resonate queer wavelengths where my queer realities (queerealities) meet with Oliveros’ as present on the album at the time of the recording. To better understand this experience of interaction happening between wavelengths sonic and queer, I explore Oliveros’ identity, history with Deep Listening, and her connection to lesbian politics to better understand where these resonant wavelengths are emanating from. Likewise, I explore my own queer identity and relationship with sound. I seek to understand how the Deep Listening to this album impacted me, and to do I needed to reckon with where I was at the time of listening, and where I had come from to arrive at this place, as who I am shapes the listening, too.

This listening is present in the interaction of nature (the cave’s inherent nature noise) with queer identities. I would be remiss if I did not examine the connection between queerness and nature, as well as queerness, sound, and nature. I bring in queer ecology, as well as cultural geography, and scholarship on queer sound studies to better understand this crossroads I find myself at in this thesis, where nature, sound, and queerness meet in the figures of myself and Oliveros, interacting through the act of listening to her album Troglodyte’s Delight, over thirty years after it was first recorded.

Convocation Year

2024

Convocation Season

Fall

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