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The Deaf Musical Experience

Bodily and Visual Specificities: Corpaurality and Vusicality

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Perception, Representations, Image, Sound, Music (CMMR 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 12631))

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the bodily and visual specificities of the Deaf musical experience, by first focusing on the investigation of a fundamental principle of the human experience, the corpaurality, that engages to consider the sono-sensitive bodily qualities and the natural hearing modalities of Deaf; and secondly considering the visual dimensions of music, based on the Deaf practices, that reveal a denormalized musical expression, namely the vusicality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Following the Deaf revendications, I write ‘Deaf’ with a capital D which, as specified by Charles Gaucher, “announces a quest for identity which falls into very precise historicity and is stated in terms which seek to turn the deaf difference into a cultural particularity detached from the physical incapacity which stigmatizes it” [1, p. 17]. In this way, deafness proposes itself as a social and cultural group, where the constitutive dimensions of the community rely on Deaf specific features. In this article, I use the term Deaf to designate all the individuals who claim the Deaf identity and specificities – cultural, sensorial, social, linguistic,… – but also these specificities, which present themselves like particular qualities: “the attitudinal deafness” [2].

    For information, around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss (over 5% of the world’s population – disabling hearing loss refers to hearing loss greater than 40 decibels (World Health Organization estimations). Also, and according to the SIL International census and estimates (2019), there are 144 Sign Languages around the world. However, the number of native speakers of these Sign Languages remains difficult to establish formally but can be estimated at around 10 million (information available via www.ethnologue.com).

  2. 2.

    This article is based on 2 papers pre-published in the 14th CMMR-proceeding (ed. by M. Aramaki, O. Derrien, R. Kronland-Martinet & S. Ystad, Marseille 2019): “The ‘Deaf listening’. Bodily qualities and modalities of musical perception for the Deaf” (p. 276–285) & “Visual-music? The Deaf experience. ‘Vusicality’ and Sign-singing” (p. 846–852).

  3. 3.

    “The most basic factor determining who is a member of the deaf community seems to be what is called ‘attitudinal deafness’. This occurs when a person identifies him/herself as a member of the deaf community, and other members accept that person as part of the community” [2, p. 4].

  4. 4.

    I develop here this new criterion to the other musical parameters of the sign-singing established since my doctoral research [5].

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  1. Aix Marseille University, CNRS, PRISM, Marseille, France

    Sylvain Brétéché

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  1. Sylvain Brétéché
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Correspondence to Sylvain Brétéché .

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  1. Laboratoire PRISM, CNRS-AMU, Marseille, France

    Richard Kronland-Martinet

  2. Laboratoire PRISM, CNRS-AMU, Marseille, France

    Sølvi Ystad

  3. Laboratoire PRISM, CNRS-AMU, Marseille, France

    Mitsuko Aramaki

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Brétéché, S. (2021). The Deaf Musical Experience. In: Kronland-Martinet, R., Ystad, S., Aramaki, M. (eds) Perception, Representations, Image, Sound, Music. CMMR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12631. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70210-6_28

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