Music, Signed

Music is conventionally perceived as an art form that utilizes sound as its fundamental medium of expression. The omission of Signed Music from scholarly works has been due to the common perception that music is identified solely through audition and a lack of awareness of both what constitutes Signed Music and how Signed Music has developed as its own performance art. However, recent scholarship has examined how musical cultures treat performance as the central component of the artistic work. In this regard, the Deaf community shares in the performative practice of music. When signed language, visual-gestural performance and multisensorial input are used to express artistic performances within the Deaf community, the result is called Signed Music. The emergence of American Sign Language (ASL) poetry and the technological advancement of film and media from the 1930s to the present have contributed to the evolution of Signed Music. Current musical works from Deaf performers have led researchers to investigate the musical elements in Signed Music such as rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre, and texture.

[Page 703]Audism has played a significant role in the development of Signed Music. Many musical cultures are inherently audiocentric and are thereby exclusionary toward Deaf artists. Anabel Maler observed that Deaf people in their community engage with music and sound through a variety of media, notably in the translation and interpretation of songs through the signed modality. One can infer from this observation that the perception of music as audiocentric is contradictory to Deaf people’s cultural experience with sound. Some Deaf musical performers have created bands of their own, such as Beethoven’s Nightmare, which perform in the same way that bands with hearing members do. In these bands, musical instruments such as drums and guitars are used along with minimal use of signing lyrics. Similar to the way Beethoven’s Nightmare performs, Deaf performer Sean Forbes uses musical instruments and relies on auditory-based songs with English lyrics to create translated and interpreted ASL versions.

Deaf individuals’ engagement with this audiocentric type of music varies a great deal: Some Deaf individuals express a feeling of inclusion when participating in or attending translated Signed Music performances, while other individuals express discomfort with performances that are first and foremost auditory and then translated as an afterthought. Hearing society’s perspective, that music requires the auditory-based musical elements, has historically inhibited many Deaf performers from engaging in music through the signed modality.

Unlike auditory-based music, Signed Music is fundamentally based on visual-gestural performances that emerge from within the Deaf community. Due to the relationship between Signed Music and its cultural roots, using an ethnomusicological approach to study Signed Music is essential to gaining a sufficient understanding of its performance. Knowledge of the historical and cultural development of ASL performance and the ability to identify how audiovisual media act as musical, performative tools are critical to understanding Signed Music. Signed Music is only comprehensible in the context of other Deaf performance arts. Furthermore, it is significant because it reclaims music as its own and reflects cultural autonomy in the performance. Signed Music challenges scholars to ask what culture owns music and what culture has the authority to define what music is.

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