Pauline Oliveros was an American composer and accordionist, born in Houston on 30 May 1932 and died in Kingston, New York, on 24 November 2016. She began the accordion at nine, was part of the circle around the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the early 1960s, and in 1967 became director of the centre once it moved to Mills College.
In 1988 she climbed down a manhole into a disused two-million-gallon cistern beneath a former army base in Washington state, about fourteen feet deep, where a sound took close to a minute to die away. Playing there with the trombonist Stuart Dempster and others, she coined the term Deep Listening, a pun that grew into a practice of attentive, whole-body listening. With Dempster and Panaiotis she formed the Deep Listening Band, which sought out caves, cathedrals and cisterns, and her foundation became the Deep Listening Institute in 2005. She taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from 2001 until her death.