Pauline Oliveros (1932 - 2016) was a composer, performer, author and educator among the first to adopt an experimental and multidisciplinary approach to music, aimed at including the sounds, both internal and environmental, that accompany us every day. By integrating the body and its constantly evolving technological extensions into his research, he has tried to transform and subvert its daily functions through listening and sound. Indeed Oliveros believed in the transformative and healing powers of listening and developed a collaborative, organic and non-hierarchical approach to performance. Audience, performer and author overlap, often in a context of free improvisation that Oliveros describes in the following terms: «manipulating sound materialities without a preconceived system, relying on the presence of an internal subconscious organization, to then compose by reflecting and extracting from a vocabulary emergent sound, [...] a discovery of how to create sounds rather than what sounds to make».

Born in Houston, Texas, she spent much of her childhood outdoors, learning to play a variety of instruments, including the accordion. In the early 1950s, he moved to San Francisco where he studied composition and began experimenting with electronic music, developing multimedia environments that included theatrical components and projections. It was in this period that the composer created her first works, using a tape recorder, which she initially employed to capture the noises of San Francisco from her window sill, marking the birth of her tape music compositions, now considered classics in the history of electronic music. Oliveros' interest in ambient sounds encompassed the entire variety of noises - from natural to man-made - that characterized the technological acceleration of the 20th century and reshaped our acoustic landscapes.