BBC -- Studying under Robert Erickson at San Francisco State College, she and her fellow students — including fellow electronic music pioneers Terry Riley and Morton Subotnick — founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a place to experiment with new methods of making electronic music such as tape loop and delay.
The art of listening — of paying attention — became the core of Oliveros’ work, explored through “sonic meditations” such as 1969’s Teach Yourself to Fly, composed during her professorship at the University of California San Diego. In 1981, tiring of the limitations of academia, she left UCSD to become a full-time composer. In 1988, what would become the Deep Listening Band (Oliveros, Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis) made its debut performance down a 14-foot deep, 2 million-gallon cistern in Fort Worden, Washington, that had a 45-second reverberation.