Adapting ASL for music
March 27, 2017 5:35 PM   Subscribe

Vox chats to music/concert ASL interpreter Amber Galloway Gallego (previously: 1, 2) about adapting ASL to fully convey musical experiences.
posted by divabat (4 comments total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
I've often wondered about sign language poetry. This video seems to touch on that - the fact that there are motions which will be poetic, in the same way that hearing people consider certain words to be poetic.

What does "rhyming" look like in sign language? I put quotes around that because it's clearly a hearing-specific concept, but I've always been curious about rhyming's analogues in non-hearing languages.
posted by juice boo at 11:43 PM on March 27, 2017


juice boo: Chapter 14 of Klima and Bellugi's masterful The Signs of Language is on this question of what features distinguish signed poetry.

saizai once translated Marot's A une damoyselle malade into ASL, following Hofstadter's discussion of its formal constraints, and he used identity of handshapes to stand in for rhyme. I don't know how standard this is but he says he didn't completely invent it and that Malzkuhn's rendering of Jabberwocky does this too.
posted by finka at 2:18 AM on March 28, 2017 [2 favorites]


I went to an amazing concert in Denmark that was a creole poetry rapper and musician from Jamaica simultaneously interpreted into Danish sign language. This was still primarily billed as an event for hearing people, though, with the sign language as an extra for accessibility.

But then the next evening, as part of the same series of events, there was a sign-language concert at a local pub. Music that was only signed, with no audible vocals (although there were accompanying guitarists and drummer, I think, and there was synchronised cool lighting stuff happening.) The audience was full of Deaf people who were singing along to the music by signing along with the singer, and non-Deaf people like me for once couldn't sing along because we didn't sign. It was a great experience of being on the other side of that barrier.
posted by lollusc at 4:50 AM on March 28, 2017 [5 favorites]


My understanding that rhyming in ASL looks similar in hand shape, signifiers, and repeated movement, like rhymes sound similar in spoken English. I'm a novice at ASL, but this looks informative: https://www.signingsavvy.com/blog/164/Tips+for+Rhyming+in+Sign+Language
posted by wiskunde at 7:34 PM on March 28, 2017 [1 favorite]


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