I had read some of Oliveros’s Meditations before for a class, however, I really appreciate that the reading gave some context as to how the exercises came to be. I would never have taught of creating music as a way to practice healing and meditation through active listening. For me music usually is the result of some sort of meditative process: the composer goes through some sort of realization or feeling that in turn is used as inspiration for music. But Oliveros saw making music as an inspiration for meditation, which is something that flipped in my head.

It was also interesting to see how this practice of Sonic Meditation created communities. We talked before in class about drum circles and about live coding communities, so music as a means to create community kind of a recurrent theme in our readings. However, this specific method is not only a result of political situations that people wanted to discuss but rather an exercise in learning how to listen to these situations and topics. This act of listening then leads towards a communal healing process which I found fascinating.

Oliveros mentions when talking about accepting others, especially minorities that “Healing can occur… when one’s inner experience is made manifest and accepted by others”. Throughout the reading, we come back to this idea of learning to actively listen to a performance, and this is something very important for the audience to do. Oliveros makes a point of how healing and meditation require an audience. It can be just one individual for the initial stages but then grows into developing an audience that must learn how to listen. Her techniques empower individuals to speak up when they are ready and explain to the audience how to engage with what they are listening to. Her philosophy promotes the type of audience needed for a communal healing process: an audience who actively listens.