Pauline Oliveros
Principal Investigator and Coordinator of AUMI
Composer/Performer/Educator
Executive Director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.
Pauline Oliveros (1932) has influenced American music extensively in her career spanning more than 60 years as a composer, performer, author and philosopher. She pioneered the concept of Deep Listening, her practice based upon principles of improvisation, electronic music, ritual, teaching and meditation, designed to inspire both trained and untrained musicians to practice the art of listening and responding to environmental conditions in solo and ensemble situations. During the mid-'60s she served as the first director of the Tape Music Center at Mills College, aka Center for Contemporary Music followed by 14-years as Professor of Music and 3 years as Director of the Center for Music Experiment at the University of California at San Diego. Since 2001 she has served as Distinguished Research Professor of Music in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where she is engaged in research on a National Science Foundation CreativeIT project. Her research interests include improvisation, special needs interfaces and telepresence teaching and performing. She also serves as Darius Milhaud Composer in Residence at Mills College doing telepresence teaching and she is executive director of Deep Listening Institute, Ltd. where she leads projects in Deep Listening, Adaptive Use Interface. She is the recipient of the 2009 William Schuman Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement. A retrospective from 1960 to 2010 was performed at Miller Theater, Columbia University in New York March 27, 2010 in conjunction with the Schuman award. She received a third honorary degree from DeMontort University, Leicester, UK July 23, 2010. Recent recordings include Pauline Oliveros & Miya Masoka and Pauine Oliveros & Chris Brown on Deep Listening, Then & Now & Now & Then: Celebrating Twenty Years, Deep Listening Band, double vinyl album, Taiga Records, 2008; Drifting Depths, vinyl release Important Records 2008, Timeless Pulse Trio, vinyl release Taiga Records 2010.
WEBSITE: paulineoliveros.us
Leaf Miller
Principal contributor of ideas for the AUMI designers and programmers
Coordinator of site visits and conferences
Liaison with Abilities First, Inc.
Certified Occupational Therapist/Drummer/Educator
Leaf Miller is a professional musician, teacher and instrument builder, playing drums and percussion in the World Music Tradition for over 35 years. She is the musical director of Women Who Drum, a multi-media project dedicated to women’s world drumming traditions. Leaf has been an occupational therapist since 1988. In her work with children with special needs, she strives to incorporate the healing benefits of drumming with her clinical training in human movement and development. She is currently collaborating with Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Institute on the AUMI (Adaptive Use Musical Instrument) Project, with the goal of developing and providing alternative musical instruments for people with physical challenges. Leaf is also on the faculty of Potential Unlimited, a music, dance, and performing arts organization for artists with developmental disabilities.
CONTACT: leaf@hvc.rr.com
Jaclyn Heyen
Project Manager - assists Leaf Miller at Abilities First, Inc and other therapists with the software
Program Development
Staff Member at Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.
Jaclyn Heyen received her BM and MM in Music Technology at Florida International University. She is currently working on the Adaptive Use Musical Instruments for the Physically Challenged Project at the Deep Listening Institute. Her research has focused on the use of music technology within a therapeutic environment. This interest informs much of her creative work, which often utilizes unique ways of working with music technology that involve motion tracking and/or unique interfaces such as an audio controller built out of the body of a scooter. She also has a deep interest in the soundscape and soundwall and how one listens and defines themselves through noise.
Her pieces have been performed at many festivals, conferences and concerts including Subtropics 20, FTM10 and ICMC. Her articles have been published in the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) Proceedings and Making Waves Journal.
WEBSITE: jaclynheyen.com
CONTACT: jackie.heyen@deeplistening.org
Sergio Hazard
Music Therapist, Collaborator and Researcher
Sergio Hazard is a Chilean Sound Engineer and Music Therapist from the Music Therapy postgraduate program of the Universidad de Chile, Faculty of Arts. He is a musician, composer and teacher of internal Taoist practices: Tai Chi, Yoga and Chi Kung. Currently he is teaching as professor in the School of Sound at the Universidad de Chile, Faculty of Arts. The course includes Music Therapy and Music Technology. He is currently working in the various Community Programs for the elderly and his private practice in Music Therapy with children, young people and adults. Since May 2009 he is the coordinator of the Music Therapy and Music Technology program for patients with complex neurological disabilities in the Assistive Technology Unit at the Children’s Rehabilitation Institute-Teleton, Santiago.
Brenda Hutchinson is a composer and sound artist whose work is based on the cultivation and encouragement of openness in her own life and in those she works with. Hutchinson encourages participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music. Brenda also improvises on a 9 1/2 foot tube with a gestural interface she designed. She has been an artist in residence at San Quentin Prison, Headlands Center for the Arts, Harvestworks, Exploratorium, Ucross and Djerassi. She is the recipient of the Gracie Allen Award from American Women in Radio and Television and has received support from the NEA, Lila Wallace, McKnight Foundation, and NYSCA and Meet the Composer among others. Recordings of her work are available through TELLUS, Deep Listening, O.O. DISCS, Frog Peak Music and Leonardo Music Magazine. Brenda will drive cross-country for any reason.
www.arsviva.cl
CONTACT: serhazard@arsviva.cl
Brenda Hutchinson
Brenda Hutchinson is a composer and sound artist whose work is based on the cultivation and encouragement of openness in her own life and in those she works with. Hutchinson encourages participants to experiment with sound, share stories, and make music. Brenda also improvises on a 9 1/2 foot tube with a gestural interface she designed. She has been an artist in residence at San Quentin Prison, Headlands Center for the Arts, Harvestworks, Exploratorium, Ucross and Djerassi. She is the recipient of the Gracie Allen Award from American Women in Radio and Television and has received support from the NEA, Lila Wallace, McKnight Foundation, and NYSCA and Meet the Composer among others. Recordings of her work are available through TELLUS, Deep Listening, O.O. DISCS, Frog Peak Music and Leonardo Music Magazine. Brenda will drive cross-country for any reason.
Paula Josa-Jones
Paula Josa-Jones, MA, CMA, RSME/T, is a choreographer, director and equestrian who has developed a unique form of visually charged dance-theater built on the sensuous experience of the body as landscape and source for movement, image and voice. Her work with her company Paula Josa-Jones/Performance Works includes theatrical choreography for humans, inter-species work with horses, dancers and riders, and work in film and video. Paula has worked with Pauline Oliveros for twenty years, and created three performance works featuring Pauline's music, including "Skin" (1990), "Ghostdance" (1996), and "Antigone's Dream" (1999). Deep Listening is an integral part of Paula's practice and teaching.
After two decades of creating theatrical works for humans, in 1998, Paula returned to riding and her childhood love of horses, and created an inter-species company with horses, dancers and riders. She has devoted herself to the study of dressage and areas of horse training and care including TTouch and Clicker Training, and is committed to an embodied and intuitive approach to the human-horse bond. In 2001 she premiered RIDE©, a groundbreaking work of equestrian dance theater, which continues to develop in performance and film.
Paula is the director of EMBODIED HORSEMANSHIP® which uses somatic movement practices, including Laban Movement Analysis/Bartenieff Fundamentals, Tellington TTEAM/TTouch®, Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais to bring a quality of emotional, physical and mental balance and expressivity into our relationships with our horses and humans. She teaches improvisation, creative process and Performing Wide Awake for performance artists in all genres. She has taught in the dance programs at Tufts University, Boston University and at universities, colleges and dance festivals nationally and internationally. Her writings on movement and dance have been published in Contact Quarterly. Paula is currently writing Horse Dreams, a book on her work with horses. She competes and performs and plays with her Andalusians Amadeo and Capprichio.
WEBSITE: Paula Josa-Jones
Tiffany McCormick
Project Assistant
Tiffany McCormick is 25 years old and entering into her final semester of her BA Honours English Degree at the University of Guelph. She has a diploma in Journalism - Print and Broadcast from Conestoga College and has always had a love for writing. Alongside a career in the editing/publishing field, her goal is to one day become a children's author.
Currently, she lives on a far East of Durham, the town not the region, and is number four of my parent's six children. She has six nieces and nephews whom she adores, and who have provided her with inspiration for some of the stories she has been working on.
Though she has only been involved for a short while, she is enjoying her time with the AUMI Project, and is honoured to be a part of such a wonderful group.
Gillian Siddall
Researcher
Improvisation, Community and Social Practice project (ICASP)
ICASP - Gender and the Body Adaptive Use team
Dr. Gillian Siddall is the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. She is also an Associate Professor in English. Her publications include “‘That is what I told Dr. Jordan’: Public Constructions and Private Disruptions in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” Essays on Canadian Writing; "I want to live in that music’: Blues, Bessie Smith and Improvised Identities" in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation; and “Nice Work if You Can Get It: Women in Jazz” (co-authored with Ajay Heble), Landing on the Wrong Note: Jazz, Dissonance and Critical Practice. Dr. Siddall has been a co-researcher in several collaborative research projects on educational development, in partnership with other Canadian universities. She is also co-founder of the Guelph Jazz Festival, now in its 17th year.
Sherrie Tucker
Researcher
Improvisation Community and Social Practice project (ICASP)
ICASP - Gender and the Body Adaptive Use team
Sherrie Tucker is Associate Professor in American Studies at University of Kansas. She is the author of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands of the 1940s (Duke, 2000) and co-editor, with Nichole T. Rustin, of Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz Studies (Duke, 2008). She is co-editor, with David Katzman and Randal Jelks, of the journal, American Studies. Sherrie is one of the founding members of the University of Kansas Interdisciplinary jazz Studies Group and a former member of the Columbia Jazz Study Group. She facilitates the “Improvisation, Gender, and the Body” team for an international Collaborative Research Initiative of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, entitled, Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice. In 2004-2005, she was the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor at the Center for Jazz Studies, Columbia University. She is currently a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellow, completing a book project on swing culture and war member, entitled, Dance Floor Democracy: the Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen.
Ellen Waterman 
Researcher
Improvisation Community and Social Practice project (ICSP)
ICASP - Gender and the Body Adaptive Use team
Ellen Waterman is a flutist and scholar interested in the dynamics of improvisation as a profoundly everyday activity. We are all constantly interacting with our environment, playing off of tiny shifts in perception to make choices that affect the play of movement and sound around us. Most of this dynamic activity goes unnoticed. Ellen explores musical performances as a sensitive articulation of the micro-ecology of specific moments
Curtis Bahn
Co-Principal Investigator, designing computer interfaces for the project
Composer and Program Designer, Arts Department, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Former Researchers/Programmers
Zane Van Duzen
Original Programmer
Iris A. Hodgson
Don Millard
Co-Principal Investigator, directing design, construction of devices and programming
Electrical Engineer
Director of the Academy of Electronic Media (AEM), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Zevin Polzin
Composer and Lead Programmer: researches, designs, and implements controllers and programs for the children
Former staff member at Deep Listening Institute, Ltd.
Zevin Polzin is a composer and computer programmer specializing in music and disability. His current projects include Adaptive Use Musical Instruments, software instruments for multiply disabled children; and Lifesongs, interactive, projection-based musical interfaces for patients in hospice and nursing care. He has a B.A. in Music Technology from Bennington College and an M.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
K. Sarah Yiu is a second year Master’s student in the school of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. Her areas of interest are feminist and gender studies, critical race theory, and literary and cultural studies. Her work focuses on racial and gendered embodiment, specifically on the racialized and gendered constructions of the Asian North American body and how representations of the “Asian eye” often serves as the signifier of difference. She is a dedicated feminist and anti-racist activist, a Women’s Studies teaching assistant, a member of the Women of Colour Collective in Guelph, and a radical blogger. She worked as an ICASP research assistant in the fall of 2009, where she wrote a research piece on the Riot Grrrl movement. In the winter of 2010, she served as the project manager of the AUMI project and continues to be an invested fan of the project.
