In the absence of sound

25 May 2015

My laptop’s been out for the count a while now…almost a month ago, the speakers started crackling a bit. The next day, it wouldn’t turn on. Apple took their time repairing it…but after replacing the entire logic board, the speakers are still crackling of their own accord and no sound will play through the speakers or the headphone jack.

This new soundless environment has given me pause to think about just how often I engage with sound, on a day-to-day basis. Particularly when it comes to multimedia communications, and my use of the internet. For example, the #freethearts protest last Friday included a video about how to learn ‘the hoofer dance’, and I was completely unable to engage, because the sound was necessary to understand the instructions.

My RWAV group’s piece is based on the topic of ‘communication’, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the particular ‘palettes’ of communication we have available to us. For example, different languages and dialects can vary so widely yet still be open to interpretation. I found travelling through Europe that Spanish or Catalan was far easier for me to understand than German, less because of what was being said than how. The German words were closer to English, but the Catalan way of expressing themselves was closer to Izzy-speak.

Something that came up time and time again in our group discussions was Auslan – the language of the deaf. It’s interesting that the three of us were so drawn to this particular form of communicating, particularly because it’s something that is incredibly difficult to communicate through radio. How would we use a sound-based medium to communicate a language that is so visual, that is essentially the absence of sound?

After exploring a number of different avenues, and also realising we probably have more material than we can actually use already, we decided to forgo the interview with a person who is deaf. I would still really like to explore this at some point though. Having an interpreter and speaking about such a visual language may simply not work for the radio format, but I’d love to try and see if it would be possible, and explore some creative solutions around how to communicate a conversation in Auslan through a sound-based medium like radio.

Comments are closed.