First of all, unfortunately, I have not participated in or tried meditation in the professional sense. So I can’t really draw any conclusions on the difference between Sonic Meditation and other meditations.
What makes me feel interested is the way how Oliveros’s Sonic Meditation going:
“Take a walk at night. Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears.”
Mirror
Kinetic Awareness—Make your last audible breath a sung tone
Circle—Visualize your signature letter by letter slowly. Simultaneously hearing your name. Do this forward, then backwards. (Without sound) See your signature in a selected color. Do these with eyes closed and eyes open.
Bowl Gong Meditation. If you lose track of the pitch or want to verify your memory hit the gong again.
Walk once around the room as slowly as possible backwards
Teach yourself to fly as long as possible
What Oliveros did was very similar to games in a broad sense. And these ways just remind me of a book called Grapefruit by Yoko Ono(小野洋子). The subtitle of this book is called “A Book of Instructions and Drawings”. In this book, I will refer to its first section called “music”, she also mentioned a lot of interesting, unusual ideas for making or enjoying music. I will give you some random examples:
Stone Piece
Take the sound of the stone aging.
TAPE PIECE II
Rome Piece
Take the sound of the room breathing.
at dawn
in the morning
in the afternoon
in the evening
before dawn
CLOCK PIECE
Listen to the clock strokes.
Make exact repetitions in your head
after they stop.
In my opinion, they both instruct people to experience some sounds by synesthesia or to reproduce some sounds with methods like memorizing. And just as how Roger Caillois defines games, both of them let people experience sounds or music in a way separated from the routine of life; they let people have an uncertain experience of those sounds, because it is encouraged to involve people’s initiative; what’s more, they are unproductive…
In general, what they both have in common is the use of games or unconventional methods to actively engage people in the act of “listening”. As a non-popular way, this active “listening” is not only an art but also a medium for meditation or thinking.