Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music

in software for people, Pauline Oliveros (1984: 190) composed a seemingly simple sentence that has far-reaching implications: “Good attentional flexibility is essential for participation in music no matter what one's role is.” Attentional flexibility is on vivid display in Anabel Maler's Seeing Voices: Analyzing Sign Language Music, published in 2024 as part of the series Oxford Studies in Music Theory edited by Steven Rings. Maler's six chapters ask readers to visit what might seem like a small island off the coast of music studies—sign language music—then reveal the island to be a veritable continent, one that is largely unexplored by our field. She directs theorists to attend to parameters of music in ways that challenge long-accepted norms, ultimately revealing the considerable discoveries that derive from her exacting methodology. Reading this book can be, in the best sense, provocative. My marginalia included phrases like, “If that's true, then we need new textbooks.” Maler has generously opened an important corpus of music to her readers while simultaneously providing a theoretical and notational apparatus for its analysis.Seeing Voices is, at root, a study of varied and expansive modes of musical participation. It centers the singing voices of Deaf musicians via their art and their testimonies. The reader is asked to understand signed music from the perspective of signers, singers, watchers, listeners, composers, scholars, filmmakers, lyricists, transcribers, and cover artists. The book challenges theorists to attend to movement as music, effectively expanding our field's purview. Maler achieves these aims not by polemic but by responsible inquiry, providing a thoughtful and well-organized study of a series of musical works and the artists who created them. Part 1 provides historical context for sign language music via two chapters that survey the past and present of the art form. Part 2 presents four chapters devoted to theoretical topics punctuated by deep dives into individual works and performances. The book's generous companion website hosts more than one hundred videos which collectively provide more than one hundred forty minutes of content. As such, properly experiencing Seeing Voices amounts to a hybrid act of reading, listening, and watching.The introduction makes clear the apparent paradox: Music theory is a phonocentric discipline, while sign language music is, in most contexts, a nonsounded art. Maler faces this apparent contradiction head on, arguing that sound itself is a particular type of movement, that of pressure waves that are perceived by the brain. She extrapolates this fact into a redefinition of music as “culturally defined, intentionally organized movement” (9). The book is founded on the notion that analyzing sign language music involves acknowledging the totality of body movements made by signing musicians—including their lips, eyes, brow, hands, torso, and legs—as music. This analytical perspective grants the unsounded movements of the sign language musician all the attendant parameters that music theory commonly affords to sounded music, including melody, meter, and phrase rhythm. One can imagine theorists hesitating at the non-sonic nature of Maler's definition. A definition, however, should be judged by the implications of its adoption. Once music is defined as movement, large doors swing open. One has the feeling that this definition, while fashioned to address sign language music, will find applications far beyond it. With this novel perspective in hand, the reader moves from the introduction to the body chapters with a curiosity about how this wider, movement-based definition of music will ramify.The pair of contextual chapters begins with chapter 1, “Music and Deafness in America, 1820–1965.” A sharp and useful distinction is made between two historical philosophies of speech therapy experienced by members of the Deaf community. The pedagogical method of oralism set out to teach Deaf children to communicate not with a sign language but via speech and lip-reading. This viewpoint received institutional support in 1880 when the Second International Congress on the Education of the Deaf, commonly known as the Milan Congress, banned sign language within Deaf education. By contrast, manualism was based on manual methods of instruction including communicating via sign language. It was the manualists, we learn, that held music to be a valuable aspect of Deaf education. Maler charts the decades-long confrontation between oralism and manualism, registering the surfeit of technologies which grew up alongside them, including the first electrical hearing aid, the Akoulathon, and its descendent, the Acousticon. The historical narrative here flows with vivid liveliness—by no means a given within theory monographs—and the momentum of Maler's writing documents the damage done by oralism's insistence that music lies solely in the domain of sound and, as such, outside the bounds of Deaf experience.Chapter 2, titled “Deaf Culture's Musical Presents,” documents modern-day sign language music via interviews with its practitioners and lays out a decidedly more hopeful and varied landscape than the oralist past encountered in chapter 1. The last word of the chapter's title encodes an elegant double meaning: The chapter surveys signed singing's contemporary moment, while its testimonies are gifts to the field of music studies. Maler selects ten contemporary signing musicians with varied relationships to Deaf and hearing cultures and interviews them about their art. These musicians are Harmony Baniaga, Teresa Blankmeyer Burke, Paris Glass, Matt Maxey, Warren “Wawa” Snipe, Rosa Lee Timm, Raven Sutton, Marko “Signmark” Vuoriheimo, Susan Weinfurtner, and Pamela Witcher. (In addition to being one of Maler's interlocutors, Witcher created the piece of visual art, titled The Symphony, which graces the cover of Seeing Voices.) Chapter 2 is itself an archive, one that provides a historical snapshot of the ways in which today's signing musicians understand what it is they do, and why. Maler groups the interview topics into motivations; expression and emotion; translation; copyright and accessibility; on the nature of music; hearing people and sign language music; music and Deaf culture; innovations in sign language music; communities of sign language music; the elements of sign language music; and the future of sign language music. If that sounds like a lot, it is. The range of content makes this chapter the longest, and a case could be made that it forms the basis for another book entirely. This is not to suggest that it has no place here; on the contrary, its collected testimonies reveal aspects of sign language music-making that phonocentric theorists will find educational and thought provoking.Among the testimonies of Maler's ten interlocutors, themes emerge. One concerns the bias by members of the hearing community toward hearing musicians at the exclusion of Deaf ones. Video interpretations made by artists within the hearing community often contain inaccurate signs, which prompts musicians such as Paris Glass to correctively repost the videos, adding captions that point out signing inaccuracies. Maler is careful not to portray the opinions, philosophies, and interests of signing musicians as a unified block. She documents divergent viewpoints within and around the Deaf community with regard to the function and meaning of sign language music. For example, Rosa Lee Timm testifies that music has always been a part of Deaf culture, while Susan Weinfurtner claims that music is somehow separate from it. The reader emerges from chapter 2 with an impression of the resilience and variety of Deaf music-making alongside a sense that the field finds itself in a moment of significant technological and sociological change. By documenting so many voices speaking frankly about a musical practice undergoing intense development, Maler has created an essential record that music scholars will rely on for years to come.The second part of the book comprises four analytical chapters: “The Signing Singing Voice,” “Rhythm and Meter,” “Melodic Techniques,” and “Meaning and Form.” These are preceded by a short but critically important interlude titled “A Note on Notation.” The interlude provides insight into Maler's process of creating the notation employed in Seeing Voices. She thoughtfully combines Valerie Sutton's SignWriting system, ASL glosses, and standard five-line music notation, all of which are intended to be used in tandem with the videos from the companion website. The result is a multivalent system for visualizing sign language music. Maler created the ASL glosses in collaboration with Dr. Anne G. Liversidge, a Deaf native ASL user who is also fluent in English. The methodological interlude allows Maler to acknowledge that her notational practice—like all notation systems—has strengths and limitations. Most music scholars are unfamiliar with the grammar and sign formation of ASL, and Maler's thoughtful interlude allows Seeing Voices to proceed on common ground with the reader.The analytical chapters formally begin with chapter 3, “The Signing Singing Voice.” Maler begins with an overview and synthesis of several theories of voice, drawing from scholarship by Mladen Dolar, Brian Kane, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Annette Schichter, H-Dirksen L. Bauman, Alexis MacIntyre, Jessica Holmes, and Amanda Weidman. The scholarship review is especially useful since Maler's topic is predicated on an expansion of what counts as voice, and who does the counting. In this way, Seeing Voices actively takes up recommendations set forth in Ellie M. Hisama's (2021) article “Getting to Count.” Maler cites the Grove Music Online definition of song as “a piece of music for voice or voices, whether accompanied or unaccompanied, or the act or art of singing” (Chew et al. 2001). Such a definition is compatible with sign language music because signing is not, for Maler, like music: It is music. She makes plain that phonocentric ideologies of the voice have harmed Deaf communities, and chapter 3 provides a direct refutation to such exclusionary ideologies. Maler explores six key facets of the signing voice: prosody, facial expressions, mouth morphemes, eye gaze and movements, body movements, and communality. All these aspects are explored via detailed analyses of two sign language covers by Rosa Lee Timm: “Come What May” from the soundtrack to the 2001 film Moulin Rouge and Carrie Underwood's 2012 track “Blown Away.” The analyses are accompanied by Maler's multivalent notational transcriptions as well as videos of Timm signing her songs. The analysis of “Come What May” is a model of clarity and efficient theorizing and will provide curious readers with a helpful introduction to Maler's transcriptions as they interact with Timm's music. Aspects of performative delivery that our field often treats as marginal or otherwise insignificant—including brow furrowing, nose wrinkling, eye widening, and shoulder position—are here shown to be the voice itself. Maler's approach is marvelously defamiliarizing to mainstream theoretical practice. The net result reinforces the book's overall thesis that, in sign language music and indeed in all music, the voice can be understood and experienced as a phenomenon of movement.Chapter 4, “Rhythm and Meter,” picks up a leitmotif that is found across the book: the signed song “Boat, Drink, Fun, Enjoy” from a 1939 filmed performance by George Kannapell. The song has an exceedingly clear rhythmic profile and does not include any sounding elements, making it a useful reference point for presenting the fundamentals of signed singing. Maler uses this song to explore questions of entrainment, pulse, and rhythm as they play out in sign language music. She sensibly appropriates scholarship on sign language poetry to highlight four movement types: hold emphasis, movement emphasis, movement size, and movement duration. She takes up notions of groove in dip-hop, a genre named by Warren Snipe that Maler defines as “a Deaf or hard-of-hearing artist simultaneously performing vocalized and signed rapping over a looped background beat” (124). Maler addresses how each of the four movement types play out in Sean Forbes's “A Song for My Haters,” again making use of a fruitful combination of video excerpts and a notation that includes ASL glosses, rhythmized English, percussion notation of the snare and bass drum parts, and five-line staff notation of the synth part. Maler then returns to “Boat, Drink, Fun, Enjoy” to introduce the concept of visual meter. Building on metric scholarship on Cardi B by Robert Komaniecki, Maler makes a case study of five dip-hop songs: Wawa's “Faceless Man” and “Only ASL One,” Forbes's “Two Blown Speakers” and “I'm Deaf,” and Marko “Signmark” Vuoriheimo's “The Letter.” These five songs present a compendium of contrasting approaches to metric alignment between the signed and the spoken. With Maler as a guide, one begins to appreciate how demanding, and yet how rewarding, it is to properly attend to a dip-hop song in all its complexity.By this point in the text, Maler has convincingly asserted that signed singing requires redefining several of theory's parameters. In chapter 5, however, the parameter of melody proves to be a more difficult circle to square. Definitions of melody less readily map onto the visual-kinesthetic modality of sign language music. Maler's solution is to rely on portions of Gino Stefani's (1987: 23) generalist definition of melody as “what everybody sings and whistles” and which is “easy to listen to, to recognize, to memorize and repeat; a line, a single voice; a figure against a background, a prominent element; something gratifying, sweet, involving emotions.” To be sure, not all melodies are gratifying, sweet, or easy to listen to, but Maler deftly corrals Stefani's broad definition, channeling its universalist tone into a convincing taxonomy of melodic parameters within sign language music. She does so via a comparative analysis of ten filmed signed performances of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Marlee Matlin, Heather Whitestone, Phyllis Frelich, John Maucere, Treshelle Edmond, Aaron Loggins, Christine Sun Kim, Warren Snipe, Candace Jones, and Rosa Lee Timm. Ever the organized theorist, Maler overlays the corpus of ten anthems with a set of testable criteria, comparing each version's periodic duration, rise-growth-fall curve, and continuous movement in space. She then studies each version's relation to what she calls “the popular signing voice,” a welcome and expansive play on the subtitle of Victoria Malawey's (2020) influential monograph A Blaze of Light in Every Word: Analyzing the Popular Singing Voice. Maler's categories of the popular signing voice are medium register, limited range, flowing line, relatively slow movement, and ease. Watching all ten performances (via the companion website) while reading Maler's well-delineated analyses provides an object lesson in the richness of melodic techniques within sign language music.Having taught a course on cover songs for the past eight years, I read Maler's cover analyses with interest. Cover songs appear throughout Seeing Voices, and their intersection with Maler's definition of music as movement has wider implications. Cover analysis is founded on careful identification of what the cover artist takes and, as important, what they leave behind. The aesthetic philosophers Cristyn Magnus, P. D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir (2013: 362) claim that cover songs fall into four categories: mimic, rendition, transformational, and referential. None of these categories make sufficient space for sign language covers. Indeed, ASL covers complicate existing definitions of cover songs in exciting and fruitful ways. What might a theorist of cover songs make of the fact that an ASL cover does not re-sound the original's pitch material and instead transcribes it from air vibrations into body movements? ASL covers also pry open norms of copyright, as many parameters by which covers are understood by legal scholars (see Parhami 2019) are absent in sign language interpretations. Maler's theorizing about the mechanics of borrowing—most vividly registered in chapter 5’s throughgoing analysis of Timm's interpretation of Underwood's “Blown Away”—will become a permanent part of my syllabus going forward.Chapter 6, “Meaning and Form,” harnesses the energies and analytical tools from the preceding chapters to animate three case studies. The first is Russell Harvard's cover of Paula Abdul's “Straight Up.” Here the book moves ever closer to fusing with its companion website, as still images isolating Harvard's changing body positions appear in the text itself. Deeper in the two case of which signed songs with no Rosa Lee Timm's uses the music of movement to present a narrative via meter, melody, and rhythmic This analysis Maler's the totality of her analytical rhythmic notation, metric ASL glosses, still and The is as the reader who has experienced each of these elements in of the book them in the of an piece of signed singing. 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