Rhythm Stories and Songs, Signed

Language and literature are the most important vehicles for “driving music” in the Deaf community. Members of the American Deaf community have expressed many of their songs through their rich culture of rhythmic literature. These song categories and genres of Deaf music are American Sign Language (ASL) poetry, traditional ASL storytelling, translated songs, Deaf raps, signing with choreographed dances, and percussion signing (including chanting forms: fight, protest, and spirit songs).

Deaf people in history have sought ways to find how music can be redefined to embody their ways of being. In the technical sense, sound is composed of vibrations propagating through a medium such as air, and it travels in two ways: through the auditory channel and through the skin. The sense of hearing is a mechanical sense akin to a sense of touch. This perception is executed by tiny hair fibers in the inner ear that detect the motion of a membrane that vibrates in response to pressure. In other words, sound can be detected as vibration conducted through the body by tactilation.

Laura Petitto, a neuroscientist, studied the behavioral aspects of early sign language development and explains that the hand babbling of a deaf child is more rhythmically distinct from all hand movements that babies make. There is also other research showing that deaf babies respond to music when they are fetuses in the womb. Hearing babies will also produce a songlike babbling that has rhythm. Deaf babies respond similarly in both aspects—inside the womb and outside when they babble with their hands. Petitto also discusses how prosodic elements of ASL (e.g., rhythmic elements that support meaning) were included when mothers signed to their babies, providing a language model. This may lead to a possible link between rhythm in music and prosody in ASL that helps deaf children learn. Just as music is expressed through the spoken language of hearing mothers singing to their babies, deaf babies also find delight in music when rhythm is visible through sign language.

Rhythm is a vital component of music that has helped humankind in a variety of ways. First, it serves as a mnemonic force for encoding knowledge. Oral traditions have succeeded in preserving information: “The multiple reinforcing cues of a good song—rhythm, melody, contour—cause music to stick in our heads. That is the reason that many ancient myths, epics, and even the Old Testament were set to music in preparation for being passed down by oral tradition across the generations.” Second, it helps train motor coordination in children’s activities, such as jumping rope. According to Rita Corey, a drama teacher and longtime choreographer who has taught dance to deaf people for over 20 years, Deaf people do not have a problem picking up new dance steps following the number 8 system along with the music.

Rhythm in music has provided “input to the human perceptual system that allows for the prediction and synchronization of different individuals’ behaviors.” This statement supports the imitation behavior of the earlier Petitto study of the deaf child acquiring rhythm through watching and imitating the prosodic element of the ASL stories given by the teacher. This sense of stimulation in the brain could also explain why Deaf people, when they see or feel the rhythmic clap, can learn to synchronize with the clap and join in harmonic clapping. Contemporary evidence of this tendency is the Bison Song, the spirit song of Gallaudet University. The synchronized clapping during the song performance conceals who on the Bison Song team can hear and who can’t.

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