Encountering Music: Songs Seen, Felt, and Heard

Kelsie Acton, Caroline Howarth, Mieko Ouchi

Canadian Theatre Review, Volume 184, Fall 2020, pp. 15-20 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774059

[ Access provided at 26 Feb 2021 13:57 GMT from UFRN-Universidade Federale do Rio Grande do Norte ]
 Encountering Music | FEATURES

Encountering Music:
Songs Seen, Felt, and Heard
by Kelsie Acton, Caroline Howarth, and Mieko Ouchi

Songs My Mother Never Sung Me (Songs) is a semi-autobio­
graphical chamber opera by Dave Clarke about his relationship
with his Deaf mother, his discovery of music, and his journey to­
ward becoming a composer. This bilingual piece combines Amer­
ican Sign Language (ASL) and sung English to chart the life of
the hearing boy from infancy to adulthood. Songs is performed
by four actors playing the roles of Mom, the Voice of Mom, Boy,
and the Narrator (who is Boy as an adult). It is almost fully bilin­
gual with the Voice of Mom singing an English version of Mom’s
signed ASL text, and Boy and the Narrator signing and singing,
often simultaneously. The piece is scored for grand piano, with the
instrument figuring prominently in the narrative and as a symbol
of sound. The plot is structured around Boy’s milestone birthdays;
we see Boy as he grows, develops communication skills, and learns
about the world at home and eventually beyond, and we observe
how he both resists and embraces ASL as he matures. In Clarke’s
words, it is “the story of how my mom helped me find my voice”
(1). Throughout the piece, Clarke’s experiences as a CODA (Child
of Deaf Adult), his passion for music, and his love for his mother
all contribute to the creation of a world where music and sound

Boy with rubber duck and Mom sitting signing, others gathered behind. Foreground (l–r): Luc Tellier and Elizabeth Morris. Background (l–r): Kieran
Martin Murphy, Erik Mortimer, and Susan Gilmour.
Photo by Epic Photography Inc., courtesy of Concrete Theatre

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FEATURES | Encountering Music
are tactile and visual as well as auditory. The convergence of music
and sound as auditory, tactile vibration, visual imagery, and ac-
tor movement creates an aesthetic that ultimately results in differ-
ing degrees and kinds of access for Deaf1 and hearing audiences
throughout the show, thereby commenting on the inequalities be-
tween Deaf and hearing access to different forms of aural and vis-
ual communication in general. These different kinds of aesthetic
access play on audience members’ varied comprehension of ASL.
In the following, we explore this aspect of the opera by examining
how the production reconfigured sound and music as tactile vibra-
tion, represented sound visually, and developed and incorporated
embodied and rhythmic ASL text.
Songs was developed by Concrete Theatre, a company “com-
mitted to creating, developing and producing artistically excellent
Theatre for Young Audiences that examines stories relevant to the
lives of children, youth and families” (“About”). Songs began as a
10-minute play at the Sprouts New Play Festival for Kids in 2008
and then, several script workshops later, culminated in a workshop
presentation at SOUND OFF, Edmonton’s Deaf Theatre Festival.
In 2019, the full production premiered in the same festival. All
three authors of this article were involved in the production: Caro-
line Howarth and Mieko Ouchi co-directed and co-dramaturged
the 2019 production and worked on Songs throughout its de-
velopment process, and Kelsie Acton joined the production in
2019 as Assistant Director. All three authors are hearing, which
means that—like the hearing audience of Songs—our access to
some parts of the production is partial and limited by our ru-
dimentary understanding of ASL. Working within the bilingual
(ASL/English) rehearsal space from this positionality meant that
questions of access and communication were alive and urgent for
all involved; the steep learning curve that we all experienced in-
forms our analysis.
The production context of Songs within a Deaf theatre festi-
val is significant because of how it influenced our expectations of
the audience, which subsequently shaped the production’s choices
around sound. Theatres that strive to produce accessible and in-
clusive work may still face difficulty in attracting audiences, since,
as Jessica Watkin observes, “barriers deterring audience members
from attending inclusive performances actually begin outside of
the theatre and may begin to develop long before a performance
takes place” (103). Songs’ inclusion in SOUND OFF—a festival
that is well known to the Deaf community in Edmonton and that
has worked over the years to address many of the barriers that exist
for that community—was therefore crucial to building a Deaf au-
dience for the production. This, as well as the casting of Elizabeth
Morris, one of Canada’s most recognizable Deaf actors, ensured
that the production was well attended by Deaf and hearing audi-
ence members. As a Theatre for Young Audiences (TYA) company,
one of Concrete Theatre’s goals with the multi-sensorial approach
of the opera was to invite and encourage dialogue between Deaf
and hearing audience members. While Songs might educate hear-
ing audiences who are unfamiliar with Deaf culture, that is not its
primary intention. Instead, it seeks to address these two audiences
quite differently through an aesthetics of accessibility that engages
with music and sound multi-sensorially.
The aesthetics of accessibility is a driving force in Canadian
disability arts. Rose Jacobson and Geoff McMurchy define this as
an aesthetic approach “which declare[s] access to be an integral
16 ctr 184 fall 2020
part of creative content and the artistic process from inception
to presentation” (8). Though accessibility with a mixed hearing
and Deaf cast and production team was an important focus
within the rehearsal process and is something that we touch on in
this article, we are primarily focused on addressing questions of
accessibility for the opera’s audiences. To do this, we explore how
music and sound moved beyond the auditory into tactile, visual,
and embodied spheres in three key ways: first, in how sound was
transformed into tactile sensation through banks of speakers with
increased bass frequency and through vibrotactile technology that
was placed underneath the audience seating; second, in how sound
and vibration were represented visually through stage imagery
and video projection; and third, in how the rhythmic qualities of
the music were embodied by the actors and visually represented
by the rhythm of the carefully translated ASL text. Though our
intention was to create a fully and equally accessible production,
we ended up with differing levels of access for Deaf and hearing
audiences in a way that ultimately prioritized  Deaf audiences
and thereby reinforced Songs’ themes of overcoming audism and
privileging Deaf experience.
Vibrotactile Technology
Vibrotactile equipment was used to translate sound into tactile
sensation for both the audience and the actors in Songs. These
techniques are used in a variety of contexts, including Deaf Rave’s
work in London, UK, supporting the training of Deaf DJs and
sign song performers to celebrate Deaf culture’s relationship with
music, and David Bobier’s work at the VibraFusionLab in Lon-
don, Ontario, which develops chairs, pillows, and floors that vi-
brate in relation to sound. Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich
suggest that low-frequency vibration is a place “where hearing and
deaf scholars have recently been meeting” as a place of shared ex-
perience that unsettles the “ear-centrism of Sound Studies” (76).
The importance of vibration as a manifestation of sound is built
into the plot of Songs. Throughout the performance, a grand pia-
no occupies centre stage. When Boy and his Mom first receive the
piano as a gift from hearing grandma, Mom is resentful (a feeling
that Morris, playing Mom, understood). Mom has no use for the
piano but begins to appreciate it when she realizes that, by plac-
ing her hands on the piano, she can feel the vibrations when Boy
plays in the lower registers. Mom and Boy discover the creative
possibilities of the piano and its sound together, playing with the
instrument to create louder and louder sounds to simulate a light-
ning storm, a hurricane, and an earthquake.
The vibrational nature of sound was
heightened to provide access to
the intensity of the sound through
non-auditory means.
Sound designer Bobby Smale mic’ed the piano and rigged
subwoofers and bass shakers, which were positioned underneath
specific areas of audience seating. At key moments in the
performance, such as when Mom and Boy use the piano to create
a storm, hurricane, and earthquake together, these subwoofers
and bass shakers would vibrate the seating risers and chairs,
doi:10.3138/ctr.184.003

Group around piano with Mom’s hand on the side of piano. (l–r): Erik Mortimer, Luc Tellier, Susan Gilmour, and Elizabeth Morris.
Photo by Epic Photography Inc., courtesy of Concrete Theatre
allowing the audience to feel the vibrations. The subwoofers
and bass shakers were directly under the section of audience
prioritized for ASL speakers and Deaf audience members, so
the vibrations were most intense there. The vibrational nature
of sound was heightened to provide access to the intensity of the
sound through non-auditory means.
Smale used a cardioid array of three Meyer Sound 700-HP
subwoofers on either side of the stage facing the audience. They
were large impressive speaker stacks, which were very noticeable
upon entry to the theatre. The microphones in the piano fed dir­
ectly to these subwoofers, providing vibrational effects that were
experienced by the entire audience. He also created some comple­
mentary harmonic tones to make the low-frequency waves more
solid and consistent, noting that he “was doing a lot of work with
system processing, crossovers, and time alignment, because it can
get very muddy in the low end if you’re not careful” (qtd. in King
36). Surprisingly, these speakers did not increase the volume of
the sound and music in the performance, but merely amplified
the vibrational effects for the audience.2 The subwoofers and bass
shakers highlighted only key moments of the production, but the
overall sound design and the plot of Songs consistently drew at­
tention to the vibrational nature of sound. Vibration is a shared
experience of sound for the characters and the audience. Both Boy
and Mom find common delight in the dramatic vibrations created
by the lower register of the piano. And both the Deaf and hearing
audiences experienced vibrations from the bass shakers and the
doi:10.3138/ctr.184.003
Encountering Music | FEATURES
subwoofers, although the Deaf audience experienced them more
intensely in the augmented seating.
Projection
In addition to the use of vibration, projections were used to sug­
gest and enhance the experience of particular sounds. The set in­
cluded two large white shapes that resembled an overhead view of
a grand piano that acted as projection surfaces. These projection
surfaces were on wheels and could be moved around the stage (in
contrast to the actual piano that was stationary at centre stage).
Projection designer Kim Clegg developed the video-mapped pho­
torealistic images that were projected onto the screens and which
provided an almost ‘green screen’ like setting for the scenes, os­
cillating between Boy and Mom’s home, a school yard, the gro­
cery store, and various other settings. These images shifted and
changed as the play progressed, and projections were also used to
emphasize the nature of the auditory elements in the performance.
One scene in particular highlights how the projections were used
to adapt sound into visual images.
In this scene, set before Boy is old enough to go to school,
he decides to climb to the topmost shelf of a kitchen cupboard to
steal a cookie while Mom is in another room. Despite his efforts,
Boy is unable to reach the cookies and he falls. The fall is con­
veyed musically with a rapid run of notes on the piano indicating
the falling and a series of crashing noises indexing the moments
Boy hits the counter and the shelves on his way to the ground.
ctr 184 fall 2020 17
FEATURES | Encountering Music
Open grand piano. Bobby Smale.
Photo by Epic Photography Inc., courtesy of Concrete Theatre
The projections mirror the music: the cookie jar grows bigger and
bigger as Boy climbs towards it and then zooms out of sight as he
falls. Each time Boy hits the shelves and the counter, the piano
crashes, and the projected images ripple, suggesting the vibration
of the crash on the piano that accompanies each impact. Immedi­
ately after Boy falls, he begins to cry, and when Mom does not
respond, he pounds on the floor to attract her attention. Here, the
vibrational nature of sound, already augmented by the subwoofers
and bass-shakers, is further highlighted by how it is transformed
into a visual medium.
Rhythmic ASL
The final way that sound was expanded beyond the auditory realm
was how the ASL text, English text, and the music were carefully
matched and adapted to each other. As a CODA born in London,
UK, Clarke’s first language is British Sign Language (BSL). As ASL
and BSL are quite different, Clarke elected to write the libretto in
English and have Amorena Bartlett, the production’s ASL coach,
and Morris translate it in collaboration with Deaf consultant Con­
nor Yuzwenko-Martin. This first level of translation was then re­
formed by the introduction of the music. Bartlett said of the process:
I thought everything was going smooth. And I was teaching
it and they were practicing it and everything seemed to be
going well. Then the music came in and we tried to match
the music with the interpretation I had provided and then
that was not working, and then fine, we need to readapt to
the beat, because some of the songs are really fast and some
of the songs are really slow. So we have to match this time, the
music, if it was a soft, beautiful song, how can we exaggerate
the signs so it doesn’t look weird. (Bartlett et al.)
18 ctr 184 fall 2020
The translation of the English libretto into ASL had to be
done with careful attention so that the rhythmic beat of the music
was represented visually in the signing. Rehearsal was therefore a
process that involved constantly adapting the music, English text,
and ASL so that each matched and suggested the qualities of the
other. The actors aligned their ASL and sung English through the
use of breath, visual cues, physical proximity, touch, and hearing.
The rhythms of the ASL text, English text, and music mirrored
each other and were evident to the audience visually and auditorily.
Limits of Understanding
Through an aesthetics of accessibility, Songs renders music and
sound as tactile, visual, and embodied through vibration, project­
ed imagery, and rhythmic ASL. In doing so, the boundaries of the
senses become blurred. This multi-sensory experience, however,
was not equally accessible to all members of the audience. Clegg’s
projections were visible from any seat in the audience, but both
the use of vibration and musical ASL were primarily accessible to
Deaf audience members. Smale’s subwoofers and bass shakers were
located in the area of the audience seating reserved for ASL users.
Subsequently, Deaf audience members in those seats experienced
more intense vibrations compared to the rest of the audience. Sim­
ilarly, while non-signing audience members were able to recognize
the rhythmic nature of the ASL used by the performers, the more
subtle appreciation of Bartlett, Yuzwenko-Martin, and Morris’s
work translating English to ASL to convey rhythm was not fully
grasped. This work and skill, however, would be obvious to Deaf
and signing members of the audience.
Through an aesthetics of accessibility,
[the opera] renders music and sound as
tactile, visual, and embodied through
vibration, projected imagery, and
rhythmic ASL.
Songs is concerned with valuing the relations and ways of
being that are particular to Deaf experience. For Boy, growing up
is a process of learning and unlearning audism, which H-Dirksen
L. Bauman defines, in part, as “[t]he notion that one is superior
based on one’s ability to hear or behave in the manner of one who
hears” (245). Boy learns to value music, but also to value the “songs
seen and not heard” (Clarke 1). Songs’ multi-sensory approach to
music and sound asks all members of its audiences to appreciate
how music and sound exist beyond the auditory. The production,
however, deliberately creates moments where Deaf experiences are
prioritized over hearing ones. This includes the Deaf audience’s
understanding of the rhythmic ASL text and moments of humour
where characters translate ASL into English after the line is signed,
so Deaf audiences understand and ‘get’ the joke first. There are also
four sections—in video calls that Mom makes—where ASL is not
translated into English at all.
In two of these calls, Mom is speaking to her hearing
mother—her sign is exaggerated and includes non-ASL gestures
to communicate to a non-fluent signer. She also mouths English
words as she signs. The other two calls are with a Deaf friend.
doi:10.3138/ctr.184.003

These calls are conducted in fluent and complex ASL. Morris says
of these moments:
When, you will notice, the Deaf audience did, when I was
talking to my friend my ASL was pure ASL and it was vibrant.
When I was speaking to my Mother, I was signing, very, very
rigidly, kind of almost gestural. The sad thing is, most Deaf
children of parents who are hearing, their parents don’t know
fluent sign language. So you often have to gesture…. And the
one thing that I love is the Deaf people laughed and I know
the hearing people didn’t get it, they didn’t quite catch on to
that. And that was just a moment and it was an intentional
moment…. So it was just a bit of a moment to put somebody
in somebody else’s shoes. (Bartlett et al.)
After one performance a hearing audience member ap­
proached us to tell us that they found these non-translated sections
frustrating and alienating. These moments briefly place hearing
audience members in the position that Deaf audience members
are likely familiar with—the experience of inaccessibility.
Acknowledging differences across audiences’ knowledge and
sensory experience can be foundational to exploring an aesthetics
of accessibility. Disabled dancer and choreographer Alice Shep­
pard, for instance, highlights this in discussing the development
of artistic and satisfying audio description of dance performances.
She describes designing audio description that involved multiple
Boy reaching for cookie on high shelf. (l–r): Kieran Martin Murphy and Luc Tellier.
Photo by Epic Photography Inc., courtesy of Concrete Theatre
doi:10.3138/ctr.184.003
Encountering Music | FEATURES
tracks, recognizing that different users will have different capacit­
ies to process auditory information so that “if you are a member
of what we’re calling expert listeners, you can process two tracks
at once” (Sheppard, para. 20). These audio descriptions provide
aesthetic access, but the experience of that access is different de­
pending on audience members’ skills and knowledge.
[The opera’s] multi-sensory
approach to music and sound asks
all members of its audiences to
appreciate how music and sound exist
beyond the auditory.
Similarly, Songs deliberately privileged Deaf audiences both
through the pragmatics of audience seating configurations and
through specific renderings of cultural and linguistic knowledge.
We can safely assume that the Deaf audiences often experience
uneven access to the world. For the span of this performance, Deaf
ways of communicating and experiencing the world were privil­
eged through an aesthetics of accessibility that was multi-sensorial.
In the world of Songs music and sound is auditory, but also tactile,
ctr 184 fall 2020 19
FEATURES | Encountering Music
visual, and embodied. Not all members of the audience had equal
access to the experience and information conveyed by these senses.
In this production, Deaf access is prioritized, drawing attention to
the inaccessibility and audism of the broader world.
Notes
1 Throughout this paper we use ‘Deaf ’ as opposed to ‘deaf.’ ‘While
‘Deaf ’ can refer to the broad range of experience, it is often used “by
those in the Deaf community who consider themselves to be cultur­
ally Deaf, while lowercase ‘d’ ‘deaf,’ described instead the audiologi­
cal state of being” (Equity Office 13).
2 One piece of vibration technology that was experimented with in
the rehearsal process was a small wireless and wearable vibrotactile
device that Smale developed for Morris to assist with cues and pro­
vide access to the musical rhythm through haptics. To do this, he
adapted a transducer—a device that translates sound into the phys­
ical sensation of a rhythmic beat. Morris wore the device on her
shoulder blade in order to feel the tempo and pacing of the music.
The device itself was manageable, but the battery pack grew hot,
cumbersome, and overwhelming. Ultimately, Morris elected not to
use the technology for the performances and instead relied on visual
and sound cues (with an assist from hearing aids), though she noted
that, with further development, this device could become a useful
tool for integration and accessibility of Deaf performers working
with music. Smale is continuing to develop this technology.
Works Cited
“About.” Concrete Theatre. concretetheatre.ca/about/.
Bartlett, Amorena, et al. “Panel Discussion.” SOUND OFF: Deaf
Theatre Festival, 16 Feb. 2019. Arts Barns Lobby, Edmonton, AB.
Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Audism: Exploring the Metaphysics of
Oppression.” The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education,
vol. 9, no. 2, 2004, pp. 239–246. doi.org/10.1093/deafed/enh025.
Medline:15304445
Clarke, Dave. Songs My Mother Never Sung Me. Concrete Theatre,
2019.
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Equity Office. Expanding the Arts, Deaf and Disability Arts, Access
and Equality Strategy. Canada Council for the Arts, 2012.
Friedner, Michele, and Stefan Helmreich. “Sound Studies Meets Deaf
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doi.org/10.2752/174589312x13173255802120.
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About the Authors
Kelsie Acton is a neurodivergent dancer, choreographer, and researcher.
She is the Inclusive Practice Manager at the Battersea Arts Centre (the
world’s first Relaxed Venue), a member of the Critical Design Lab, and
her Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC)-funded
dissertation examines the accessibility of practices of timing in disabil­
ity dance. Her choreography has been presented by Nextfest, CRIPSiE,
and the Expanse Movement Arts Festival in Edmonton, and she recently
participated in the inaugural Dancing Disability Lab at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Caroline Howarth is a director, dramaturge, and educator. An As­
sociate Professor of Drama at Concordia University of Edmonton, she
is a Co-Founder and Artistic Associate with Concrete Theatre, where
she coordinates the Sprouts New Play Festival and has directed Theatre
for Young Audiences (TYA) premiers including Paper Song, The Early
Bloomer, and Songs.
Mieko Ouchi, a Co-Founder of Concrete Theatre, works as a writer,
director and dramaturge. Her plays The Red Priest, The Blue Light, The
Dada Play, Nisei Blue, I Am For You, Consent, and The Silver Arrow are
produced across Canada and internationally and have been recognized
with the Carol Bolt Prize and a Governor General’s Award nomination.
Mieko has been recognized with three Sterling Awards as Director.
doi:10.3138/ctr.184.003