Pauline Oliveros was born in Houston on 30 May 1932. Her mother was a pianist and her father a dancer. At a very early age, she became acutely aware of the sounds which surrounded her: the crackles of her father's short-wave radio, bird songs, the croaking of frogs, the voices of her parents mixing with the sound of the car engine on road trips, etc. At the age of 9, her mother brought home an accordion; she developed a passion for the instrument, going on to study it with Willard A. Palmer at the Moores School of Music (University of Houston), alongside studies of horn and tuba.

The realisation that she was homosexual led her to leave her deeply conservative home state of Texas. Resolved to become a composer, she moved to San Francisco in 1952, where she taught accordion and horn to make a living and pay for her studies with Robert Erickson at the San Francisco State College. While there, she met Terry Riley and Loren Rush, with whom she formed a short-lived improvisation trio in 1957, the year in which she graduated with a degree in composition. In 1964, she attended the premiere of In C by Terry Riley, a seminal work of musical minimalism.

In 1958, she experienced a kind of epiphany when she found that her tape recorder was able to pick up sounds that she herself could not perceive. This led her to focus her energy on listening, as attentively as possible, to the sounds that surrounded her. The following year, she worked alongside Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick (with additional input from Robert Erickson) on the creation of an electroacoustic music studio at the University of San Francisco. In 1960, compositions by the three composers combining improvisations and pre-recorded sounds were presented in a concert titled "Sonics." During her time at the studio, Oliveros composed her first work for fixed media, Time Perspectives (1961). Sender and Subotnick left the university in 1961 in order to establish the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Oliveros subsequently wrote the vocal work Sound Patterns, heavily inspired by her experiences with electronic music; the piece was awarded the Gaudeamus Prize in 1962.

In 1966, she composed a series of electroacoustic works at the University of Toronto. In the same year, the San Francisco Tape Music Center received financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the following year, a $15,000 grant in order to merge with the Mills Center for Contemporary Music, with Oliveros being named as Director. In this setting, she composed the Bogs series. In 1968, she accepted a teaching position at the University of San Diego, where she met physicist and karate master Lester Ingber. The two collaborated on research on music perception, giving rise to the composition of Sonic Meditations in 1971.

Oliveros left San Diego in 1981, briefly interrupting her teaching activities in order to live and work in Kingston (upstate New York). In 1985, she created the Pauline Oliveros Foundation (which would become the "Deep Listening Institute" in 2005), an organisation whose objectives included promoting of the work of female composers (specifically Anna Rubin, Shelley Hirsch, Lois V. Vierck, etc.). In 1988, she developed the notion of "deep listening," a term applied to her work on combining music with meditation.

Following an invitation from Joe Catlano, in 1991, Oliveros participated in a "tele-musical" production in which musicians in six different cities (Kingston [NY], New York [NY], Houston [TX], San Diego [CA], Los Angeles [CA], and Oakland [CA]) performed together remotely. In 1996, she became the Darius Milhaud Composer-in-Residence at Mills College. From 2001 until her death, she taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy (NY). Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, her works, many of which had rarely been performed, were recorded and released (in some cases, re-released) by a number of experimental music labels (Lovely Music, Important Records, Table of the Elements, Sub Rosa, Pogus, Hat Hut, etc.).

In 1999, Oliveros was the recipient of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States Prize for her life's work. In 2009, she was awarded the William Schuman Prize from Columbia University, and a retrospective concert of her works (from 1960 to 2010) took place at Miller Theater (also at Columbia University) on 27 March 2010.

Pauline Oliveros died in her sleep on 24 November 2016, at the age of 84.