In 1988, Pauline Oliveros climbed a 14-foot ladder into an empty underground cistern in Port Townsend, Washington, carrying an accordion. Inside, sounds lingered for up to 45 seconds, and playing with the space rather than over it gave rise to the practice she called Deep Listening. This episode traces her path from a Houston childhood with a pianist mother to becoming a foundational architect of electronic music and a philosopher of human attention.

The conversation covers her first tape recorder at 21, the San Francisco Tape Music Center she co-founded with Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender, the tape-delay techniques behind her celebrated 1967 electronic piece, and her unexpected turn to karate under physicist Lester Ingber, which shaped her theory of sonic awareness. It also explores her decision to leave a tenured post at UC San Diego, the Deep Listening Band’s recordings in caves and cathedrals, her retuned accordion, her Second Life orchestra, Echoes from the Moon, her 32-year partnership with IONE, and the Long Beach Opera season devoted to her work.

• Why the accordion was the popular, portable instrument of choice in the early 1940s
• How magnetic tape let composers physically cut, loop, slow, and reverse sound
• Focal versus global attention: the dot-and-circle model borrowed from martial arts awareness
• Sonic awareness as a synthesis of consciousness psychology, martial arts, and feminist thought
• Bouncing radio signals off the Moon to create a two-and-a-half-second natural delay