THE ENHANCING MUSIC OF SIGN LANGUAGE

By Christine Sun Kim Alhamdulillah, praise be to Allah. I've summarized summarize a ted talks video by Christine Sun Kim about music of sign language. One of the interesting languages for me is sign language because we use the unspoken way to communicate with people who can not speak or hear as a normal person. So, in this video, she talks about 15.11 minutes with interesting topic. She started her speech by delivering the symbol of musical. Piano, “p” as her favorite musical symbol means to play softly. After explain about her favorite musical symbol, Kim continued about American Sign Language history and her background. First of all, French sign language was brought to America during the early 1800s. as time went by, mixed with local signs then evolved into the language as we know ASL. So, it has a history of about 200 years. Then, her background. Kim was born deaf and taught to believe that sound was not a part of her life before she realized that sound was very much part of her life. She delivered her experience as deaf who live in a world of sound as if living in a foreign country. She understand sound by watching how people behave and respond to sound. She At the same time, she had learned that she create a sound. she called some sound as “sound etiquette” such as "Don't slam the door!", "Don't make too much noise when you're eating from the potato-chip bag!", "Don't burp, and when you're eating, make sure you don't scrape your utensils on the plate." Hence, her drawing, TBD, to be decided. TBC, to be continued. TBA, to be announced. And you notice the staff that there are no notes contained in the lines. That's because the lines already contain sound through the subtle smudges and smears. In Deaf culture, 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 you'll notice in her drawings, she stick to four lines on paper. Her experience in 2008 when she had an opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany, for an artist residency there. She had been working as a painter. At that time, sound was trending and auditory was everywhere. Now, sound has come into her art territory when she realized that does not have to be the case at all. It does not have to be something jus experienced through the ears but it could be felt or experienced as a visual, or as an idea. So, she decided to reclaim ownership of sound and to put it into her art practice. She realized that sound like money, power, control and social currency. There is a massive culture around spoken language. At school, at work and institutions, she works with many different ASL interpreters. Their voice becomes her voice and identity. She shared about piano metaphor for better understanding of how ASL works. She illustrates as a piano. ASL is broken down into many different grammatical parameters. If you assign a different parameter to each finger as you play the piano, such as facial expression, body movement, speed, hand shape and so on, as you 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, you can express different ideas. This represents how time is expressed in ASL and how the distance from your body can express the changes in time. "Common time" is a musical term with a specific time signature of four beats per measure. Yet when she sees the word "common time," what automatically comes to mind for her is "at the same time." So notice RH: right hand, LH: left hand. We have the staff across the head and the chest. Then, she demonstrated a hand shape called the "flash claw." She asked the audience to follow her. Everybody, hands up. Both the head and the chest, kind of like "common time" or at the same time. That means "to fall in love" in International sign language. International sign language, as a note, is a visual tool to help communicate across cultures and sign languages around the world.nThe second one, she demonstrated "colonization" in ASL. The third is "enlightenment" in ASL. Then, she asked them to do all three together. "Fall in love," "colonization" and "enlightenment." So, 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 own form of currency without sound. This could possibly be a step to lead to a more inclusive society. And maybe people will understand that you don't need to be deaf to learn ASL, nor do you have to be hearing to learn music. ASL is such a rich treasure that she would like you to have the same experience and invite you to open your ears, to open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language. We never know, we might just fall in love with them.