The Enchanting Music of Sign Language

                                  The Enchanting Music of Sign Language

Christine Sun Kim was born deaf and she was taught to believe that sound wasn't a part of her life and she believed it to be true. She realizes now that that wasn't the case at all. The sound was very much a part of her life. 

In Deaf culture, the movement is equivalent to sound. This is a sign for "staff" in ASL. A typical staff contains five lines. Yet for her, signing it with her thumb sticking up like that doesn't feel natural. That's why we'll notice in her drawings, she sticks to four lines on paper. Now sound has come into her art territory. She realized that doesn't have to be the case at all. She actually knows the sound. She knows it so well that it doesn't have to be something just experienced through the ears. It could be felt actually or experienced as a visual or even as an idea.

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 high spatial and highly inflected, meaning that subtle changes can affect the entire meaning of both signs and sounds.

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 and so on, as we play the piano, 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.

It's amazing to see how ASL is alive and thriving, just like music is. However, in this day and age, 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 thinking harder about what defines social currency and allow ASL to develop its form of currency without sound and this could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society and maybe people will understand that we don't need to be deaf to learn ASL.

ASL is such a rich treasure that Christine Sun Kim would like us to have the same experience and she'd like to invite us to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in their culture and experience our visual language and we never know, we might just fall in love with them.