The Enchanting Music of Sign Language Assignment

In 2015, Christine Sun Kim gave a TED Talk titled “The Enchanting Music of Sign Language.” She spends time discussing the complexity of ASL, how ASL relates to music, and the various expressions of sound. Christine is a proud, deaf artist that uses her artistic talents to express sound through different medium. I believe she was chosen to give this TED talk because she does not fall into the category where many people may place a Deaf person. She is an artist with an extreme appreciation for sound, its influence, and meaning. This is fascinating to hear from a Deaf person because to most hearing people, we register sound as something with only auditory effects, but to Christine it is much different. Christine Sun Kim is an artist who uses sound as an inspiration and does a very good job of expressing sound through art. Looking around on the internet, it looks as though her pieces are very popular and have a lot of love from the art community. She discusses how sound has a currency, that it has value in how we perceive people and situations. Since she does not use sound to communicate, she sometimes feels as though she lacks that currency and could easily sink away into her own abode. In her presentation, she discusses how sound and ASL are so specific that any small modifications can cause a big difference in meaning. She talks also about how in sign language, there are multiple parts being done at once to convey meaning, much like the way a chord would be played in music. She explained that ASL is more than gestures, it is hand shape, movement, facial expression, shoulder shifting, and sentence structure. If she gave each of these factors a key on the piano, then played them simultaneously, such as in a chord, she would be using proper grammatical parameters. Like a chord in piano, changing one key in the chord changes the entire sound of the note, much like changing a parameter in ASL can change the meaning of the sign. In music, a chord is a group of notes, typically three, played at once. Use of the word chord is a great way of explaining the complexity and value of sign language. Using music as an analogy and sound as some sort of common ground helps hearing people to understand why sign language has the same currency as voicing any other language, the same value. I have always been a very musical person. I have taken several years of piano lessons, therefore her analogies made much sense to me. The most important thing to take from this TED talk is that sign language has just as much value as any other language. She actually explains that ASL may have more components than English given that several factors must be contributed into one sign or string of signs to convey meaning. When hearing people who have not been familiarized with the language and culture of the Deaf, sometimes it can be overwhelming and difficult to understand the differences between our language and culture and theirs. When I begun taking ASL, I believed it to be a fairly direct translation of english, this sign for that and so on, however it is so much more. ASL is such a rich language with value beyond measure, one that people would appreciate more with a small amount of education. Toward the end of her presentation, Christine said a line that really spoke to me: “... that you do not have to deaf to learn ASL … I’d like to invite you to open your ears, open your eyes, take part in our culture and experience our visual language.” As an ASL student it is very encouraging to know that, even though I am hearing, I am welcome into the culture and actually encouraged to get involved to learn more. I would recommend this video because Christine does an amazing job of making her topic relatable and easy to understand. To some people, sign language is very foreign and can be difficult to fully understand. I think she does a great job of explaining the value of sign language and the beauty of its complexity.