Songs for Hands: Analyzing Interactions of Sign Language and Music

PART I: Introduction to Song Signing(1)[1.1] "Song signing" is a traditional form of storytelling found in Deaf cultures around the world.(2) The act of song signing involves translating a pre-existing song's lyrics into a signed language, or composing an original sign language song. The signed song is one of many face-to-face storytelling traditions in Deaf culture (Bahan 2006). Recently, song signing has been popularized through videos on YouTube. Consequently, the signed song has crossed over into the hearing world, and YouTube has become an online haven for communities of Deaf, hearing, and hard-of-hearing song-signers. In the present paper, I approach the signed song through a music-analytical lens. I ask how the signed interpretation conforms to the sounding music, how the performer alters signs and manipulates the signing space in order to convey musical features, and how the signer's movements can influence our understanding of the music's meaning and form. I first provide a brief introduction to the signed song and its role in Deaf and hearing cultures. Next, I identify some important aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) and ASL poetry, which will aid in understanding how signs are manipulated in song-signing performances. Finally, I provide an analysis of Stephen Torrence's interpretation of the Owl City song "Fireflies," along with additional supporting examples.(3)[1.2] Music scholars may be surprised to learn about the existence of signed songs and the appreciation and creation of music by members of the Deaf community. Deaf people almost always retain some degree of hearing and they are certainly not insensitive to the consequences of sound. In addition to sound, the tactile, the visual, and the kinesthetic all play important roles in deaf perceptions of music (Straus 2011, 169). More broadly, these other modes of perception have been shown to be significant beyond the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community, since musical experience in general involves sensory input from multiple sources.(4)[1.3] Song-signing performances comprise four principal forms of expression: music, lyrics, the signs of ASL, and other gestures independent of the signed language (i.e. dancing, swaying, pulsing, etc.). Like English, ASL is a natural symbolic language with its own distinct set of grammatical rules; it can thus be learned and understood like any other language. In contrast to aural language, however, the visual and kinesthetic nature of signed language also links it to analogic forms of expression, such as music and dance.(5) Just as singing is bounded by language, the signs in ASL songs can be seen as providing "material grounding that can help constrain the slippery acoustic bounds of musical forms" (Bickford 2007, 440). Conversely, musical features equally constrain linguistic content in both singing and song signing. The analysis of sign language songs affords an opportunity to explore how the four different modes of expression involved in these songs relate to one another, and thus to understand the contributions they make to musical expression within the signed song.PART 2: Song Signing in Deaf Culture[2.1] Music has long played an important role in Deaf cultures around the world. In fact, one of the earliest records of song signing can be found in a film project by the National Association of the Deaf, produced between 1910 and 1920 (Bahan 2006, 23). Bahan observes that there are two traditional types of signed songs in Deaf culture: translated songs, and percussion signing (2006, 34). The "translated song" is a genre in which "the lyrics of various songs are translated into ASL and performed for an audience" (34). Bahan gives the example of the song "Yankee Doodle" as a commonly translated song from the early- to mid-twentieth century. Percussion signing involves "arranging signs to certain beats" (34). A famous example is the "Bison Song," a traditional sports song written in the 1960s by Dorothy Miles. …