Ear Yoga: Think With Your Ears

Often dampened due to pressures of the modern urban soundscape, our capacity to truly listen and absorb the everyday can be minimized or ignored. In Ear Yoga, re-tune your ears to the primal sense of acute hearing.

Sound Artist Bruce Odland has spent his career highlighting the complex and vibrant sonic landscapes that make up our world. In this intimate workshop, Odland will facilitate a series of exercises designed to stimulate the “hunter-gatherer” precision of hearing. Participants will be encouraged to stretch underused auditory muscles, expand their reach and potential, and “think with their ears.”

About the Speaker

A pioneer in sound installations, Bruce Odland is an artist who thinks with his ears. His first public sound installation, SUN SONG, broadcasted a four-channel cloud of reverberant sound over an outdoor festival in Denver from the Clock Tower of East High in 1977. Since then he has discovered resonance and beauty in both the fractal music of nature and the transformation of vast industrial soundscapes of cities into harmonic music. In 1987 he founded O+A with Austrian sound artist Sam Auinger. Together they have developed a “hearing perspective” of the culture we live in and have responded with installations that change the perception of public space. Their latest collaboration is a permanent installation, Hearing View (2013), containing a library of healing sounds for the Rheinau Psychiatric Clinic, the oldest psychiatric institution in Switzerland.

Over the years, Odland has lent his ears to many collaborative projects in film, dance, museum installation, and theater with artists such as Laurie Anderson, The Wooster Group, Peter Sellars, JoAnne Akalaitis, Wallace Shawn, Andre Gregory, Peter Erskine, Tony Oursler, Dan Graham, Robert Woodruff, Bill Morrison, Stacey Steers, Ron Miles, and many others. He has received artist grants and awards from NYSCA, Foundation for Performing Arts, Bermont Foundation, the DAAD Fellowship, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute residency, Golden Muse, Helen Hayes, Golden Reel, and Focus awards, and a Prix Ars Electronica. He is founding the Tank, a center for sonic arts and experimentation in a giant abandoned water tank in the high desert of Western Colorado.