Pauline Oliveros

Born in Houston, Texas on 30 May 1932, she was a composer, accordionist, and central figure in postwar experimental and electronic music. A founding member and director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 1960s, she coined the term Deep Listening after a 1988 recording session in an underground cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, where sound decayed over forty-five seconds. The practice she developed transformed approaches to improvisation, composition, and collective attention. She established the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in 1985, later renamed the Deep Listening Institute. She died on 24 November 2016.