Abstract: <\/b>Products such as headphones, music streaming platforms, and learning assessments foster a hearing-centric realization of music that places auditory senses at the forefront of musical experience. Yet within the context of Deaf culture, a linguistic minority defined by the use of sign language, music takes on new meaning as musical experience is expanded to other senses of the body. Despite this relative construction, music in Deaf culture has been subjugated to a hegemonic ideology that undermines and marginalizes Deaf experiences of sound. However, Deaf musicians have been able to work toward subverting the ideological limitations that have been placed on their music, and by extension their bodies, by adapting musical structures produced by mainstream society and realigning them toward Deaf priorities. Using ethnographic methods including artist interviews, this chapter investigates how Deaf rappers have created a style of hip hop that prioritizes Deaf experiences of sound over hearing ones and considers how, through performance, they subvert hegemonic control over Deaf musical expression and promote the inclusion of Deaf forms of musicking.<\/p>\n \n \n Katelyn E. Best <\/b>is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Musicology at West Virginia University and Co-director of the Society for Ethnomusicology Orchestra. She is also co-editor of At the Crossroads of Music and Social Justice<\/i>, which will be published in Indiana University Press\u2019s Activist Encounters in Folklore and Ethnomusicology series. Her work traces the development of dip hop (sign language rap) in the United States and examines the sociocultural mechanisms that have historically colonized d\/Deaf experiences of music. She has contributed articles to Lied und popul\u00e4re Kultur\/Song and Popular Culture<\/i> and The Journal of American Sign Languages and Literatures<\/i>, a peer reviewed journal with publications in American Sign Language. \nSituating Myself<\/a> \u201cTo build democracy is to include the least amongst us and society at large does a poor job of bringing others to the table, so we\u2019ll have to bring our own chairs and build a bigger table.\u201d In 1967, the Music Educators National Conference hosted a symposium on \u201cMusic in American Society\u201d to discuss the state of music education in the United States.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Known as the Tanglewood Symposium, this meeting brought together a diverse group of people with a wide range of professional backgrounds to participate in an event that \u201csought to reappraise and evaluate basic assumptions about music in the \u2018educative\u2019 forces and institutions of [US] communities\u2014the home, the school, peer cultures, professional organizations, church, community groups, and communications media.\u201d<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> The documentary report from this symposium not only provided a record of the proceedings, but also included a declaration for greater representation of musical diversity in curricula.<\/span><\/p>\n Over the years, music institutions have become more interdisciplinary and mindful of expressive forces that lie within and beyond the margins of dominant musical thought, exploring musical diversity at the intersections of race, disability, sexuality, gender, and class, among other categorical crossroads. At the same time, educative forces remain sites of production that shape musical hierarchies as they determine what forms of music are represented, to what extent they are represented, how they are represented, and who represents them. Music production, practice, learning, dissemination, and consumption naturalize and embed basic assumptions of music within society that place ideological restrictions on what constitutes music and how music should be experienced, learned, and evalu<\/a>ated. This results in the production of a musical know\u2010how that upholds certain elements as fundamental to mu<\/a>sic, generating measurements of musical quality and standards that determine musical inclusion or exclusion.<\/p>\n While musical meaning is relatively shaped and determined, music in Deaf culture, a linguistic minority defined by the use of sign language, has been subjugated to mainstream manifestations that undermine and marginalize Deaf experiences of sound.4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Products such as headphones designed to transmit music exclusively to the ear, music streaming platforms programmed solely for audio file formats, and learning assessments in the form of aural exams, implemented within classrooms to assess musical skill and development, foster a hearing\u2010centric realization of music that places auditory senses at the forefront of musical experi<\/a>ence.<\/span>5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This ideology, when projected onto music in Deaf culture, delegitimizes the culture because it constructs a reality in which deafness functions as an impediment to musical experience instead of as a component that shapes<\/a> it. However, Deaf musicians have been able to work toward subverting ideological limitations that have been placed on their music and by extension their bodies. Some musicians have done this by adapting musical structures produced by mainstream society and realigning them toward Deaf priorit<\/a>ies.<\/span><\/p>\n While music within Deaf culture encompasses a diversity of forms and is not limited to one particular style, some artists have used hip hop as a foundation to express music that is culturally localized, challenging stereotypes of deafness through their work and subverting hearing\u2010centric constructions of music in the process. This chapter investigates how Deaf rappers have created a style of hip hop that prioritizes d\/Deaf experiences of sound over hearing ones and considers how, through performance, they subvert hegemonic control over Deaf musical expression and promote the recognition and inclusion of Deaf forms of musick<\/a>i<\/a>ng.<\/p>\n My own understanding of music has been dominated by my experience as a hearing person. I grew up in a musical household, where singing around the piano was a frequent family activity and vocal tonality was prized. I consumed music through technology that catered to my body and listening practices. I studied music in academic institutions whose music instruction and assessment were designed in ways that were accessible to me and inclusive of my musical experiences. These systems privileged my perspective of music and, in turn, validated my body through the \u201cmusical ability\u201d acquired and demonstrated by it. It wasn\u2019t until I began graduate studies in ethnomusicology at Florida State University in 2008 that I became critically aware of the musical bias embedded within them and myself.<\/p>\n I first began researching Deaf music in 2011 and, in 2012, I began conducting fieldwork on the development of dip hop in the United States, a style of hip hop that employs the technique of rapping in signed language.<\/span>6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> I became involved in this research because I was interested in learning more about this style of music, its development, and practitioners, but also because there was a dearth of research on Deaf music that employed ethnomusicological modes of investigation to examine a culturally relative construction of music in Deaf culture.<\/span><\/p>\n As a community whose members reside in various geographical locations, Deaf culture is translocalized\u2014existing in transient spaces that extend across localities, and its ethnomusicological study subsequently extends beyond geographical spaces as field locations become transient and realized in both physical and virtual domains.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> As Deaf scholar Joseph J. Murray points out, \u201cThe major features of the new Deaf cultural landscape consist of gatherings at designated public or private spaces situated both in physical, geographical space and at virtual sites that exist only in moments of active creation and consumption.\u201d<\/span>8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> When conducting fieldwork at physical sites such as Deaf festivals, ASL slams, open mic nights, and concerts, I used more traditional means of documentation including written observations, informal interviews, photography, and audio\/visual recording. On the other hand, virtual sites, like Twitter, Facebook, SoundClick, and YouTube, became both ethnographic and archival sites of investigation as the electronic spaces in which artists and their followers interact became indefinitely preserved within online platforms. In addition to this, many of my interviews with artists took place virtually, both synchronously and asynchronously, through means of Skype, Facebook messaging, email correspondence, etc. in order to facilitate scheduling, online access, and communication through a shared written language. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cStrobe lights are DAMN NOISY\u201d <\/a>Within Deaf culture, deafness is a way of life informed by a shared language, community, and sensory experience of the world; in this context, music takes on new meaning as musical experience is expanded to other senses of the body. Although agreement is complicated by different degrees of deafness, subsequent ranges of auditory perception, and ages of onset, along with a host of socio\u2010cultural factors, a culturally relative construction of music in Deaf culture stems from an intersensory experience of sound that decentralizes an aural\u2010centric framework<\/a>. Musicologist Jeannette DiBernardo Jones notes, \u201cIn a deaf musical experience, the whole body becomes the membrane. Both deaf and hearing people can feel sound vibrations, but hearing people tend to focus only on the auditory perception of these sound vibrations.\u201d<\/span>10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> While deafness naturally subverts the dominance of auditory input over other sensory domains within sonic experience, Deaf cultural practices further shape and determine interpretations of sound. As sound studies scholar Tom Rice reminds, \u201crather than being a universal set of sensory aptitudes, ways of listening are an aspect of \u2018habitus,\u2019 a set of culturally informed bodily and sensory dispositions.\u201d<\/span>11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In this regard, culturally acquired ways of knowing, participating in, and navigating the world produce shared realizations of sound within Deaf culture that deviate from traditional associations with the ear.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/a>While the word \u201csound\u201d is conventionally defined in acoustic terms, sound in Deaf culture is signified across sensory modalities. As Mara Mills observes, \u201cThe history of deaf communication makes clear that sound is always already multimodal.\u201d<\/span>12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Given the form, practice, and centrality of sign language within Deaf culture, words commonly associated with sound in oral language, such as \u201cspeaking\u201d and \u201clistening,\u201d are applied to other sensory domains. In her book, <\/span>Staring How We Look<\/i><\/span> Rosemarie Garland-Thomson uses the phrase \u201cvisual listening\u201d when describing communication in sign language. She remarks, \u201cThis kind of visual listening can exceed the range of hearing communication, as when a Deaf person \u2018overhears\u2019 a conversation across a room or chats with signers far out of auditory range.\u201d<\/span>13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Since sign language is communicated manually, the reality of \u201cspeaking\u201d applies to bodily movement and \u201clistening\u201d to visual reception. In this regard, conversations can be \u201cheard\u201d in environments that do not facilitate aural reception, for instance through windows, crowded spaces, or underwater. As discussed by Jeannette DiBernardo Jones in her chapter titled \u201cImagined Hearing: Music-Making in Deaf Culture,\u201d this concept of visual listening is realized within American Sign Language through the sign LISTEN placed by the eyes instead of the ears, the latter of which would denote aural listening. d\/Deaf educator and former American Sign Language instructor Shannon Marsh explains that for the past decade, the ASL community has tried to differentiate between listening in terms of hearing and seeing by using the number \u201c3\u201d handshape and twitching the fingers beside the eyes instead of the ears.<\/span>14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This change in placement indicates that the act of \u201clistening\u201d is being executed by the eyes but also signifies a move towards liberating words that have been colonized by hearing priorities and reassigning them to constitute Deaf ones.<\/span>15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Marsh attributes the prior use and implementation of LISTEN signed beside the ears to oralism and the Milan Convention, which led to changes in deaf education that discriminated against Deaf culture, linguistic practices, and ways of life by imposing hearing practices and values onto Deaf bodies. Forced adoption of oral communication in place of manual was the most prominent form of oppression that resulted from the Convention.<\/span>16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Marsh notes that after the Convention, \u201cThe focus on [the] ability to hear and speak was so pervasive in education for the deaf.\u201d He further remarks, <\/span><\/p>\n \u201cListen.\u201d That was a word that was preached upon deaf school kids, focusing on using our ears [\u2026] as time went on, we realized \u201cWell, listen[,] how do we listen? With our eyes! Not our ears!\u201d So, we modified the signs that were centered around ears to eyes [\u2026]. How we process language [and] input information really is ultimately [with] our eyes, not ears.17<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Rapper and actor, Darius \u201cPrinz-D the First Deaf Rapper\u201d McCall, describes implementing this practice within his performance. For instance, he explains that if he\u2019s rapping the phrase \u201cListen, hear me out,\u201d he would sign \u201chear me out\u201d beside his eyes to reflect how his Deaf audiences \u201chear\u201d him.<\/span>18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Within this example, he attributes the eyes with processes of listening. While the adoption of this practice is not ubiquitous within the Deaf community or consistent among Deaf rappers, its structure and application reflect culturally constituted listening practices that also contribute towards decentralizing the ideological pervasiveness of associations with the ear.<\/span><\/p>\n According to Deaf scholars Carol Padden and Tom Humphries,<\/p>\n There are two ways to think about sound. The most familiar is that sound is a change in the physical world that can be detected by the auditory system [\u2026]. But what is often overlooked is that sound is also an organization of meaning around a variation in the physical world.19<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Within this construction of \u201csound as variance,\u201d sound can be manifested through patterns of light, colors, motions, or frequencies. While these manifestations can be directly related to acoustic sound patterns, they can also exist outside of them. Musicologist Jessica Holmes discusses this in terms of \u201cimagined sound.\u201d In her broad analysis of d\/Deaf experiences of sound, Holmes suggests \u201cThrough the synchronization of visual cues with corresponding imagined sounds, the image and its movement thus serve as an index of sorts; the visual cue automatically triggers the \u2018sound.\u2019\u201d<\/span>20<\/sup><\/a><\/span> This is representative, for example, in switching lights on and off. While this is a culturally accepted way to get someone\u2019s attention in the Deaf community, it is also considered \u201cnoisy\u201d within some contexts. As Marsh explains from his own experience, \u201cVisual lights that are jarring [are] extremely noisy for me.\u201d<\/span>21<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Here, Marsh uses the word \u201cnoisy,\u201d one that has been linguistically tied to audible productions of sound to describe disruptive visual input and in doing so extends sonic meaning. These sonic formations and linguistic extensions can be compared to Garland-Thomson\u2019s application of \u201cvisual listening\u201d but applied to sound to refer to \u201cvisual sounding.\u201d \u201cVisual sounding\u201d is used here to denote the production of visual stimuli that are processed as rhythmic and spatial patterns and, in essence, metaphorically \u201csound.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n The sonic landscape shaped by culturally informed realizations of sound redetermines musical meaning based on Deaf aesthetics. As Deaf studies scholar Summer Loeffler remarks, \u201cDeaf people operate in a different sensory universe and thus have formed a unique take on music, one which encompasses visual and tactile forms.\u201d<\/span>22<\/sup><\/a><\/span> When song lyrics are expressed in sign language, music becomes extremely visual. When incorporated, lyrics in sign language become a fundamental musical component, one that is \u201csonically\u201d visual. At the same time, visual musical elements are not limited to linguistic expression. In her study on music in Deaf culture ethnomusicologist Miriam Gerberg notes, <\/span><\/p>\n David Spayne of Colchester England also spoke of \u201cseeing\u201d music. He says: \u201cI \u2018see\u2019 music in movement, the conductor\u2019s baton moving, the violin bows going up and down. Also on the beach, the waves lapping the shore and the trees blowing in the wind. It\u2019s the same way I lip read.\u201d23<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In this description, Spayne first provides an example of a traditional musical setting, but focuses on visual stimuli (i.e., the movements of the baton and the violin bows). The latter is directly tied to the production of sound whereas the former prompts it. In instances of acoustic silence within this setting, the conductor\u2019s baton still visually sounds. In the second example, Spayne experiences music in unconventional contexts. Here, he describes aspects of nature, which visually sound around him, as musical (i.e., the movement of water and trees).<\/p>\n In their article, Jody Cripps and Ely Lyonblum describe \u201csigned music,\u201d which they use to classify musical expression originating from within Deaf culture, as encompassing compositions that incorporate lyrics as well as those that incorporate non\u2010lyrics. They explain that \u201cNon\u2010lyrics do not include language in an explicit manner, but musicians who produce these sounds are expected to possess the necessary language and cultural knowledge.\u201d<\/span>24<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Through their example of a non\u2010lyric signed song, \u201cEyes\u201d composed and performed by J. E. Cripps, they highlight how the music of the song is sounded visually, noting \u201cShe [J. E. Cripps] performed using hand and facial movements in an abstract way [\u2026] [and] successfully produced what is visually perceived as music from beginning to end.\u201d<\/span>25<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In <\/span>A Deaf Way II Anthology: A Literary Collection by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers<\/i><\/span>, Melissa Whalen discusses her experience of visual elements intertwined with acoustic ones, writing, \u201cAt the Deaf school, we had a special music room in which flashing colored lights represented the different musical tones. When the stereo was turned on, the room became a disco, a kaleidoscope of colors flashing around the walls.\u201d<\/span>26<\/sup><\/a><\/span> While this example employs music that was created outside of the Deaf community, the incorporation of visual components dislodged the centrality of aurality within Whalen\u2019s musical listening experience. Similarly, Deaf artist and rapper Sean Forbes provides another perspective of this kind of interrelation through a video clip he posted of his band\u2019s drummer, Nick King, playing a drum kit engineered to illuminate with each percussive hit. Adding the tag \u201cvisual drummer\u201d to the post, he writes, \u201cCan you feel the rhythm just from seeing this?\u201d<\/span>27<\/sup><\/a><\/span> By adding the descriptor \u201cvisual\u201d to \u201cdrummer,\u201d Forbes identifies drumming with visual components and correlates the sense of feeling through seeing within his question referring to the rhythmic patterns played by King. These examples, provided by Whalen and Forbes, depict visual musical elements while also demonstrating cross\u2010modal components that amplify an intersensory experience of music.<\/span><\/p>\n Music in Deaf culture, as Loeffler noted earlier, can also encompass tactile components which shape musical contour. While, according to anthropologists Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich, \u201cphenomenologies of vibration are not singular,\u201d tactility can contribute to and function as another component of musical experience.<\/span>28<\/sup><\/a><\/span> As rapper and Deaf activist Warren \u201cWawa\u201d Snipe explains, \u201cLetting the music take over has a mysterious way to allow you to enjoy beats or tingling sensations that some deaf cannot hear but feel.\u201d<\/span>29<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Wawa highlights the variation of deaf experience but also indicates towards shared practices of feeling within Deaf culture. Yet, as Holmes remarks, <\/span><\/p>\n The feasibility of touch\/vibration as a listening strategy depends on a host of logistical variables, such as the material properties of a given acoustical space, instrumental register, the degree and method of amplification, and music\u2019s precise expressive function.30<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Rapper and founding member of Silent Mob James \u201cDef Thug\u201d Taylor III articulates challenges of not always being able to experience this musical component, noting, \u201cIf the music is low I won\u2019t be able to feel the beats or vibrate [and] I get frustrated.\u201d<\/span>31<\/sup><\/a><\/span> Prinz-D also describes variables that inhibit this experience, explaining, <\/span><\/p>\n<\/span>How to cite<\/span><\/h4>
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\nSound in Deaf Culture<\/a>
\nHip Hop as a Platform<\/a>
\nDip Hop Performance<\/a>
\nRepresenting and Re\u2010presenting<\/a>
\nLittle Victories<\/a>
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\nConnell Crooms, Deaf activist and former artist<\/i>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/a>Situating Myself<\/a><\/h4>\n
<\/a>Sound in Deaf Culture<\/a><\/h4>\n
\nShannon Dean Marsh, Deaf educator and former ASL instructor<\/em>9<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n
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