The sign language of music: Musical Shaping Gestures (MSGs) in rehearsal talk by performers with hearing impairments (original) (raw)
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Musical Expression among Deaf and Hearing Song Signers
In this essay, I begin to address the gap in scholarly literature on sign language songs by exploring some of the different song signing techniques used by hearing and d/Deaf performers. Through my exploration of how these techniques are employed by various performers, I argue that hearing song signers are generally motivated by a desire to express themselves musically through sign language, while Deaf song signers are more often motivated to create music in sign language. In other words, hearing signers try to convey something about their own experience of music through the medium of sign language, while Deaf song signers create sign language music, grounding that music in the characteristics of sign language.
Journal of Audiovisual Translation, 2023
Accessibility is a key concept in audiovisual translation. In recent years, the importance of equal access not only to information, services, and media, but also to the arts has been gaining more attention. Accessibility provisions for popular music, however, have not been as comprehensive as for other types of music. In order to facilitate access to music for deaf signers, a generation of interpreter-performers started to embody nonverbal elements of the "text," such as rhythm, pitch, tempo, etc., when translating a song into sign language. This practice, which is a form of audiovisual translation, is gaining momentum and has been the object of analysis in other disciplines (e.g., Musicology or Deaf Studies), but is under-investigated within Translation and Interpreting Studies. Working from studies in signed songs, from the work of Grant, and from Marinetti's notion of translation as "performative rewriting", I aim to show that performativity, intended as an action related to performance, but also with transformative potential, can become an element and a carrier of accessibility, and is at the core of these interpreting practices. The distinction between accessibility and access, however, must also be taken into account, and whether these practices actually facilitate access remains to be established by the deaf community.
MUSICAL GESTURE: FROM BODY AND MIND TO SOUND
MUSICA movet : affectus, ludus, corpus, 2019
According to the theory of embodied cognition, gestures are at the very heart of human cognitive processes. The idea of embodied cognition is based on cognitive schemata and categories that emerge from the amassed experience of being and acting in the world. In human cognitive processes, many features of cognition are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism, so the physical domain serves as a source domain for understanding an idea or conceptual domain, using the tools of metaphor. As a basic element of the physical domain, the phenomenon of gesture has garnered particular attention and it has been recently studied in various fields such as phenomenology, EMT (Extended Mind Thesis), psychology, neuro-phenomenology, neo-cognitivism, robotics, critical theory, linguistics, neuroscience, constructivism, but also in music theory. In music, gestures encompass a large territory-from purely physical (bodily) on one side of the axis to mental (imagined) on the other. From a student's adopting of a teacher's posture, even facial expressions, to the syndrome of "watching" music, as in conductors' and players' gestures, both practical (sound producing) and expressive (auxiliary), to metaphorical concepts of up and down in intervals, scales, or as recognizable idioms of a composer's language (strategic) or style (stylistic), the phenomenon of gesture in music can be explored and perceived from many different viewpoints. In this paper, the issue of the inseparability of body and sound in musical practice will be explored, especially how these two basic types of gesture in music can intertwine and help deepen its performance. For this purpose, Alexandra Pierce's embodied analytical exercises will be used, those which enable the performer to explore gesturally the expressive meaning of a musical piece. It will be demonstrated that musical gesture supports performance-oriented analysis more than we think, know, or imagine.