Deep Listening as Collective Trauma Healing: Through the Lens of Pauline Oliveros's Sonic Meditations

Alongside a critical essay, I have composed three original sonic meditations, playfully titled “Mouth Sounds,” which were collaboratively performed in the Prospect Park Music Pagoda on April 30, 2022. My journey with trauma and the use of music as a vehicle for healing is what led me to this moment: art practice grounds me, viewing art grounds me, and teaching art grounds me. Art helps me make sense of the time that has passed and the time to come. Deep listening, as defined by musician and composer Pauline Oliveros is “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you’re doing.” From psychoanalysis to auscultation, listening is fundamental to healing practices. However, in the face of collective trauma, is one on one listening ‘enough’? Despite the widespread use of sound for collective healing-- such as banging pots and pans for healthcare workers during COVID-19, and moments of silence as a tool of mourning and protest-- explorations of the intersection between collective healing, therapeutic dialogue and sound healing are few and far between. This present moment of mass mortality, grief, and trauma needs and deserves to be met with collective healing, including a diversity of traditional and nontraditional, holistic, alternative, and unexpected spaces where healing might be invited and welcomed. This project explores the intersection of Oliveros’s work with therapeutic dialogue, co-regulation, and the impact of trauma on the brain and body, and invites the reader to challenge traditional therapeutic methods with accessible, radical, transformational practices to promote individual and collective healing.