[THE SOUND OF TRYING] – STEPHANIE FARMER
A wall of words. You are the translator, feel the sound, these tiles are your voice waiting for you to fill them with the meaning you sense. Arrange captions describing what you hear in any way you are able Deaf sound exists beyond the ear, vibrating through bodies, moving in signing hands and breathing written on the page. These interactive captions encourage you to describe sound in these new contexts. Close your eyes, sense it fully, and think about where you feel the sound in your body. Then take to the words and transcribe the auditory story. Snap a photo of your poem and send it my way (sgf8023@nyu.edu). Together, we will write a greater story of sound with meaning beyond trembling waves of air.
If you would like to learn more about deaf sound art check out my undergraduate thesis here!
Accessibility
For Deaf and Hard of Hearing Audiences:
a creative description of the sound piece
[It rumbles to begin. A hum and a sting and a strum. They take over. Growing and pulsing. Your head is submerged in a pool of trembling notes. They are a sharp jet striking through the sky. But then they twist away. Angelic humming is tainted by piercing notes drilling into the eardrum infiltrating the body. Knocking at your door and still demanding entry. And then there’s an opening like maybe peace might be looming. Just as you exhale your body free of pressure, A CRASH. The sound throws itself towards you tumbling, rolling, and humming again. And even the angelic tune sounds more like an incessant ringing that sits heavy in your stomach, and scratches sharply against the back of your neck. There is nowhere to stow away, to find shelter because the noise finds you first. It slings through the sky and then down at you. Loud. No, not just loud, booming. And a tune develops as the whining fades away. A note and another. A nooottteeeee and then annnooottttthhhhhheeeeeerrrrr. Every single wave of sound travels smoothly through you until it joins forces and rolls like a boulder down a hill over you. And that ringing sits trembling until only small bangs accompany it in its descent. And as the last cymbal tingles away there is just the last wave. Quivering. Shaking. Until it can’t quite whisper anymore. All that sound, all that motion reduced to stillness. But it still rings in you. It stays in your ears, drilled in your brain. A note and another. And the silence stays unbelievably loud.]
For Blind and Low Vision Audiences:
Visual description
The installation features a pile of laser-cut tiles that each have a word engraved into them and braille labels. Between the magnets lie large white magnetic boards that act as a canvas for the arranged tiles. A laptop with a p5.js sketch open in the back lists how to navigate the installation.
for audio-guided instructions, check out this p5.js sketch that tells you how to interact with the piece. https://editor.p5js.org/sgf8023/sketches/V_nRdelGY
Process Documentations
REFLECTION QUESTIONS:
What is the theme of this work?
Sound is much more than the waves of air that travel to our ears. Deaf people, for generations, have been living with alternative translations of sound that don’t take its meaningful quality for granted. So when captions (invented originally for deaf access) describe sound in reference to other audio only mediums, that deep meaning of sound. This project seeks to recenter the poetic meaning written into every version of sound that can only be reached through intentional listening. By encouraging people to take a closer listen to sound, hearing people might be able to consider how much power it has in our lives and deaf people might find the creative potential of inferred sound or sound translations.
How is your theme particularly expressed through the modality?
Throughout the semester I’ve been exploring the process of creating access tools. Regulations and technology have led to a process of creating accessibility that is generic, contextless, and completely devoid of the artistic qualities of the original work. I hope to unsettle the robotic quality of access prioritizing personal interpretations and human imperfection. By having people choose from very obscure words to create captions, they are forced to think of captions as a more meaningful medium for poetic exploration. This has been a process in the deaf sound art production I am studying for my undergraduate thesis.
Which elements of the work are beautifully expressed through the modality? Which elements are lost or inexpressible through the modality?
Captioning sound descriptions requires the intention of word choice. By taking the time to think about the poetic possibilities of those words people are forced to think about sound differently. The goal is to eventually make the process of describing sound one that can further the meanings of audiovisual media. Captioning has the ability to speak directly to deaf and hard of hearing audiences radically inviting them into the space of multimodal art.
Who does this project exclude? Who would not be able to interact with this work? Who is this modality not accessible for?
I hope to create more access points for blind and low vision (BLV) people. In future iterations of this project, I would hope for each tile to be able to audibly announce the word engraved on it. This would allow the BLV community members who aren’t very well versed in braille to enjoy the piece effortlessly. Finding the intersections of access for BLV folks and deaf communities is often a point of access friction where one tool for one group is inaccessible to another group. Making the captioning process that is helpful to the deaf community more accessible to the BLV community is a point of creative experimentation I want to spend more time exploring. As deaf people are of the eye and BLV people are of the ear the two groups have a unique potential to work together to create a full multimodal access experience.
About the artist
As a hard-of-hearing advocate for disability justice, Stephanie explores access to the arts as tools for creative translation. Her practice spans many genres as they each provide a new method for accessibility.