Tumbling Song

Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros (1932 – 2016) was an American composer, performer and humanitarian. She influenced American music profoundly through her work with improvisation, meditation, electronic music, myth and ritual, and leaves behind a legacy of boundary dissolving music making.

Oliveros defined the idea of Deep Listening® as a conscious act involving selective inclusion and exclusion of sounds from the auditory experience. That is to say, a truly Deep Listening® that allows all sounds we hear around us to have a value, to be worth engaging with and inhabiting.

Sonic Meditations
Oliveros wrote her 25 Sonic Meditations between March and November 1971. They are instructions that anyone can follow, without any need for a knowledge of musical theory or technical skill.

The idea is to find this heightened state of Deep Listening® by paying close attention to your breathing, your body, the sounds around you; and to find new sounds of your own.

Tumbling Song is the 14th meditation and her instructions are as follows:

Make any vocal sound, but always go downward in pitch from the initial attack. The initial attack may begin at any pitch level. Go downward in a glissando or in discrete steps continuously. Go any distance in range, at any speed, dynamic or quality, but the breath determines the maximum time length of any downward gesture.