Dear List,
Several people have asked for a collation of responses to my Nov 10 2017 query about deafness and music. The collation is below. These responses were either sent to the list or to me privately (in the latter case, they are reproduced with
permission).
Regards,
Ani Patel
http://ase.tufts.edu/psychology/people/patel/
Responses to query on deafness and music
Original Query, sent Nov 10, 2017:
Dear List,
This new video on deafness and music may interest some of you:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/03/opinion/cochlear-implant-sound-music.html
If any of you have references to research studies on how deaf individuals perceive / respond to music, can you please send me the citation(s)? I am trying to assemble a bibliography for my students.
Thanks,
Ani Patel
Responses
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From Ken Grant:
Please look up the work done in the early 80s with the indigo girls who toured with a sign interpreter. That’s because they had a large deaf following. Surely says a lot about deaf love of music.
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From Pauline Tranchant & Martha Shiell:
Thank you for sharing this video. We recently published the study presented at ICMPC in 2016:
Tranchant, P., Shiell, M. M., Giordano, M., Nadeau, A., Peretz, I., & Zatorre, R. J. (2017). Feeling the beat: bouncing synchronization to vibrotactile music in hearing and early
deaf people. Frontiers in neuroscience, 11, 507.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2017.00507/full
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From Peter Lennox:
This ref might be useful:
https://ahlab.org/sites/default/files/p_nanayakkara_2013_2.pdf
Enhancing Musical Experience for the Hearing-Impaired Using Visual and Haptic Displays
Suranga Chandima Nanayakkara, Lonce Wyse, S. H. Ong, and Elizabeth A. Taylor
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From Ritva Torrpa:
Please see also the article on Signmark, a deaf, Finnish rap-artist. Not scientific, but maybe interesting. Like most deaf, he has residual hearing, but he identifies to the culture of deaf. The
story of those with CIs is completely different.
https://finland.fi/arts-culture/signmark-does-what-he-wants/
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From Tilak Ratnanather:
One has to remember the heterogenity and diversity among people with hearing loss. Kolb can only speak for herself.
My old school - Mary Hare School - is the designated national grammar school for deaf children in the UK and was the first known school for the deaf to formally introduce music into the curriculum. As someone who witnessed that in the
1970s, I wrote an article on the evolution of music at Mary Hare -
http://www-usr.rider.edu/~vrme/v14n1/vision/Ratnanather%20Final2.%20.pdf
The school also offers music therapy for all children regardless of hearing loss or not
https://www.maryhare.org.uk/music-0
https://www.maryhare.org.uk/music
https://www.maryhare.org.uk/music-technology
Apologies for the shameless plug for the school that made me what I am now.
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From Frank Russo:
We’ve put on a number of concerts for the deaf and there are a few publications related to this work but they were not very scientific — this was done in collaboration with Faculty in Fine Arts and New Media. We recently published a
good study investigating music training in deaf children with CI’s. I think that there are links to most of this work on my ResearchGate profile
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From Daniele Schon:
I was last week in Paris for a conference on music and deafness. Mostly neurosciences and rehabilitation but some music perception in CI. Nice presentation of current work by Jeremy Marozeau, showing
that the perceived tension in a musical piece (real performance) is the same for CI holders and normal hearing people. However, when scrambling the pitches the tension changes for NH people while it does not for CI. Very nice work. Not sure it is out yet.
You can ask him, he is a very nice person.
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From Leon van Noorden:
I am married already nearly 14 years with a congenital profoundly deaf lady.
She is deaf from birth to such a degree that she never could hear human speech. Only when a dog would bark hard with a low sound near to her head she would perceive it, but it could have been transduced by the sense of vibration.
Music means a lot to her. She had many years of piano lessons, and she can sing many children’s songs, although monotonously. She can speak and lip read very fluently in Spanish, her mother language, and French, as second language. We speak
French between us. She reports that her speech improved a lot during a year after college of studying orthophony . She stopped this study as it became clear that she would never be able to hear a patients voice, but it helped her later a lot to study her second
language.
After obtaining a degree in electronics and telecommunication, during which she had of course to organise her note taking with the aid of other students and the university, she got the opportunity to enter a doctoral school in France, while
doing research on a hearing aid in a laboratory of France Telecom. This enabled her to obtain a doctorate in applied acoustics. In her working life she entered in marketing in this Telecom operator and became later responsible for equipment and services for
handicapped and elderly people, now known under the title Accessibility.
She felt never the need for a cochlear implant. My wife grew up in a special family: of the 12 children 5 are normal hearing the rest are profoundly deaf from birth. She was the first deaf after 4 normal hearing ones. I think that there
are not many deaf persons that are so well integrated in the hearing world as these ones are. Of course it would be difficult to say how their experience would have been if they all would have had a CI at the age of 3 month as is common now. On the other hand
my wife thinks that even with a CI hearing will not be the same a normal hearing. She knows deaf friends where the CI support substantially lipreading, but would not enable to understand speech while not looking at the other person. I would like to add that
also in cases where it is not possible to obtain a CI a deaf person can integrate very well in society. And also that such a person helps us, “normal” people, to understand that there are more ways through which we perceive our environment than we usually
think.
Hope you find this interesting. Don’t hesitate if you or any of your students want to know more details.
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Final note from Ani Patel -- This reference might be of interest:
Iversen, J. R., Patel, A. D., Nicodemus, B., & Emmorey, K. (2015). Synchronization to auditory and visual rhythms in hearing and deaf individuals.
Cognition, 134, 232-244.