The Enchanting Music of Sign Language
By Christine Sun Kim
“
Piano ‘p’, is my favorite musical symbol. It means to play softly.”
Christine Sun Kim was
born deaf, and she was taught to believe that sound wasn’t part of her life.
She realize now that wasn’t the case at all. Sound was very much a part of her
life. As a deaf person living in a world of sound, it’s as if she was living in
a foreign country, blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors and norms
without ever questioning them.
So how is it that she
understands sound? Well, she watches how people behave and respond to sound.
People are like her loudspeakers, and amplify sound. At the same time, she has
learned that she creates sound, and she has seen how people respond to her. For
example, “ Don’t slam the door!” “ Don’t make too much noise when you’re eating
from the potato-chip bag!” All of those things she terms “sound etiquette.”
In Deaf culture,
movement is equivalent to sound. That is a sign for “staff” in ASL. In the year
2008, she had an opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist
residency. She had been working as a painter. During the summer, she visited
different museums and gallery spaces, she noticed there was no visual art
there. Sound was trending at that time, and it struck her because everything
was auditory. Now sound has come into her art territory.
So she decided to
reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into her art practice. And everything
that she had been taught regarding sound, she decided to do away with and
unlearn. She started creating a new body of work. When she presented that to
the art community, she was blown away with the amount of support and attention
she received. She realized that sound is like money, power, and control-social
currency.
There’s a massive
culture around spoken language. So, just because she doesn’t use her literal
voice to communicate, she need to work with individuals who can support her as
an equal and become her voice, she work with many different ASL interpreters,
they help her. If she didn’t continue that practice, she feels that she could
fade off into oblivion and not maintain any form of social currency.
So with sound as her
new art medium, she delved into the world of music. And she was surprised to
see the similarities between music and ASL. For example, a musical note cannot
be fully captured and expressed on paper. And the same holds true for a concept
in ASL. They’re both highly spatial and higly inflected meaning that subtle
changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.
As a piano metaphor.
ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If we assign a
different parameter to each finger as we play the piano, such as facial
expression, body movement, speed, hand shape, English is a linear language as
if one key is being pressed at a time. However, ASL is more like a chord, all
10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept or idea
in ASL. If just one of those keys were to change the chord, it would create a
completely different meaning. The same applies to music in regards to pitch,
tone and volume. In ASL, by playing around with these different grammatical
parameters, we can express different ideas.
So, it’s amazing to see
how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is. However, nowadays, we live
in a very audio-centric world. And just because ASL has no sound to it, it
automatically holds no social currency. We need to start thingking harder about
what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its own form of currency
without sound. And this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive
society. Maybe poeple will understand that we don’t need to be deaf to learn
ASL, nor do we have to be hearing to learn music.
ASL is such a rich
treasure that she’d like us to have the same experience. And she’d like to
invite us to open our ears, our eyes, take part in our culture and experience
our visual language. And we never know, we might just fall in love with them.
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