For my blog, I actually got an idea from my aunt during a Thanksgiving dinner table conversation. Her daughter, my cousin, is deaf, blind, and immobile, but she really loves music. It turns out that besides just the vibrations, there are certain very low frequencies that she can hear, so I did some research, and I found this really cool article. It's about this dutch composer Ketyman, and his work on creating music for the deaf. He teamed up with Vodafone, a cellphone provider, to create a song that deaf people could enjoy. To test and make sure the music actually sounded enjoyable, he performed it to Vera Van Dijk, a 19 year old student who was born deaf. She was requested to pick a song, and then they would play it using the limited frequencies that she could hear through her cochlear implants (a type of hearing aid). She got her friends and family to choose since she had very limited musical experience, and they chose Stay with Me, by Sam Smith. After much work and fine-tuning, he performed the composition with an 18-piece orchestra, and according to Vera, "My night couldn't get any better!" She said for the first time she felt close to hearing the world the way the people around her hear it. with a lot of hard work, Ketyman was able to create music that could reach even deaf people. So anyway I thought that was super cool, and here is the link if any of you guys want to check this out :).
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2743263/The-music-DEAF-people-Musician-composes-song-specific-frequency-cochlear-implants-pick-melody.html
Thank you so much for sharing this because I have wondered how deaf people can hear music, and what arrangements were easier to perceive. I watched the video that you attached in the link, and I think it is very inspiring and wonderful that someone took their time to let everyone hear music. Songs like these are really cool and especially because everyone can hear them. Everyone should be able to experience music and hear it for themselves. I can’t imagine what it would be like to never be able to hear such lovely sounds of music and the many different songs and techniques there are. Music takes you into another place, and it looked like Vera van Dikl really enjoyed the concert, and it let her experience a whole new world. She must have felt a huge transformation from not exactly knowing what music sounded like (when her brother was playing it, and talking about music to her) and then finally, after many years, being able to hear sounds like music and birds, which she had never heard before she had the Cochlear implant. I find it quite heartening that Kyteman learned about the sounds that deaf people could hear (with the Cochlear implant) and set out to create an enjoyable piece of music that they were able to hear as well. I hope that more people decide to create music like this, so that those without the average hearing are able to encounter more music than just the few versions of song that are out there.
ReplyDeleteReally, this is three comments.
ReplyDelete1.
What a fantastic idea! I wish they'd shown more of the process of adapting the song to the correct pitches, though. I wonder how long that took?
2.
I wonder if there will eventually be systems to do this automatically--an added feature on iTunes or Pandora, perhaps, that first asks the user and records what frequencies can be heard best and then adjusts songs accordingly.
It would have to be a pretty complex program--you couldn't just 'compress' the notes of the actual song to be closer to the audible frequencies, that would wreak havoc with the intervals. It'd have to adjust the music of a song very creatively to simulate the same general 'tone' or 'feel' of a song in fewer frequencies--and since the 'tone' and 'feel' of a song is somewhat subjective and definitely experiential, I'm not sure a computer could do it. Yesterday's and today's certainly couldn't.
3. It was sweet and sad when Ms. van Dijk said, "A pigeon, for example, makes a different sound from another bird." It sounds like a sentence one would hear from a someone much younger. That might be due in part to translation, but still. It just made me somber for a moment. It's good that someone who has been deprived for so long of so much common human experience can hear for herself now, firsthand.