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2:32am June 23, 2015
Anonymous asked: Should bands [CC] their lyrics in music videos?

andreashettle:

zorkat:

deafienerd:

rikkipoynter:

Yes. I don’t want to look up lyrics on AZlyrics while I’m trying to also see the awesomeness in a music video.

I feel this so hard

Yes! So hard to read and watch lyrics when it’s not on the same screen and in a different tab. Ugh. Even when they put it under the video itself, you have to scroll down (away from the video) to read it so you either watch the video not understanding it or read the lyrics without being able to watch the video. *sigh*

(Sorry, long reply follows. For people who can’t read the whole thing, I will try to bold face the more important bits so you can skip the rest if you choose.)

I suspect that the OP may have been actually trying to ask a different question in disguise, so let’s expose what I think the real question was and address it:

I think the OP might have been wondering, “…But do deaf people watch music videos? Would they even want to? Since the point of music videos is, like, LISTENING TO THE SOUND. Which deaf people can’t hear! So is this a thing that would even be worth the time?”

Here’s my answer:

You assume that deaf people cannot hear. NOT TRUE. Or at least, not always true.

See, being deaf or hard of hearing is like every other biological variation you can think of. Some people are very tall, some people very short, most are somewhere in between. Some people need glasses with very thick lenses, some people can get away with very thin lenses or none at all, and many people are somewhere in between.

Same thing with deafness.  Yes, there are SOME deaf people who really do hear nothing at all.  It happens, it exists.  But there are also many people who are deaf WHO CAN STILL HEAR.  (Including me!)  We just don’t hear as well as hearing people do.   

The dividing line between being DEAF and being HARD OF HEARING is not about whether you can hear at all.  All hard of hearing people (by definition) and many, maybe most, deaf people can hear.  Rather, the dividing line is whether you hear well enough and clearly enough to understand people on the phone or in any other context where lip reading or other visual cues are not available.  If you have some hearing loss but can talk on the phone–maybe needing a lot of amplification, but you still can do it without too much struggle and without missing a lot–then you’re hard of hearing.  If you can’t really talk well on the phone, or can’t do it without missing a lot or struggling a lot, then you’re deaf. 

All this being a long way of saying: yes, some deaf people do hear well enough to listen to and enjoy music in the same way hearing people do–WITH OUR EARS.  It’s just that usually we’re going to amplify it a lot more, either directly at the source of the sound (turning up the volume on the video, for example) or via our hearing aids.  But if we’re deaf, then by definition we will have a lot of trouble understanding the lyrics unless we can read the words simultaneously with listening.  Even hard of hearing people, who may hear fine on a phone line when nothing else competes with the sound of the other person talking may still have trouble understanding the words when they also are trying to hear the music.

YES, it is possible to hear the lyrics very loudly and still be unable to understand the lyrics.  First of all, some deaf people may hear low pitch sounds better than we hear high pitch sounds – not always, but it’s also not unusual.  This means some speech sounds (like vowels, and maybe some voiced consonants like “m” or “v”) may be audible for us, while other speech sounds (like unvoiced consonants like “s” or “f” etc.) may be either difficult or impossible to hear.  Many deaf people–not all, but it’s still fairly common–have auditory processing disorder, which means things may still sound garbled or simply not clear no matter how loudly we amplify it.  (This is a very over-simplified explanation of auditory processing disorder–google it, it’s a thing that hearing people can have not only deaf people, and it’s a thing that tends to be VERY under-diagnosed among both hearing and deaf/HoH people).  

So, trying to circle back to the OP: Having real captions on the screen during a music video both clues us into what the words are and also gives us some rough sense of timing.  Just the timing alone can be helpful to have when you struggle to understand the words in a song.  If the singing is very fast or slow, or if there are long pauses, or if lines or a chorus repeats itself, these all can be hard to pick up on in the absence of captions.  Reading words separately from the video doesn’t clue us into any of these factors, so we can be very easily thrown off if there is anything unexpected about the rhythm or pacing: we may think that we must surely be still listening to the second stanza when actually the song is starting the fifth stanza, or we may think we are surely on the third stanza when we are still on the first.  These issues can make it really hard to follow along with a song.  Because most deaf people have had very little real access to songs and their words (because most are never captioned), we have FAR less exposure than hearing people do to things that are considered “normal” or “common” in music, so almost EVERYTHING you’re likely to do in a song will be in some way “unexpected” for us deaf people.  In most cases, we just don’t have enough experience with music to be able to guess when the words might move along very fast or very slow or pause or repeat.  That’s why captions ON THE MUSIC VIDEO are so important for us.  And that’s why just having a transcript somewhere separate from the video can still leave us very frustrated.

All this doesn’t even begin to talk about how deaf people who can’t hear music STILL ENJOY MUSIC.  Although many (maybe most) deaf people CAN HEAR, some really cannot.  But even a person who can’t hear can still like music!  Basically you start with music that has a very strong beat to it and then turn the volume way up until you start feeling vibrations inside your chest and maybe other parts of your body.  Presto, you are now “listening” to music without needing to hear it with your ears.  People who experience music purely through vibrations appreciate having access to the lyrics too, simultaneously with whatever visuals are in the music video.  Reading lyrics separately won’t let you experience the video as it is meant to be experienced – with both the visuals and the words with their meaning reaching you at the same time.

Also not everyone who needs captions is deaf. Some have CAPD or some form of “meaning-deafness” which makes it hard for us to understand language in various forms. Just like I’m not blind but I frequently use screenreader functions on my computer due to meaning-blindness.

Notes:
  1. alliaskisthepossibilityoflove reblogged this from andreashettle
  2. thatonecrazygingerinthecorner reblogged this from boxofsharpobjex
  3. deafguardlove reblogged this from wanderingstrider
  4. fynndin reblogged this from strangestructures
  5. rumpelstiltskinix reblogged this from santorumsoakedpikachu
  6. thinksnake reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone and added:
    There’s also that music has a huge role in Deaf culture and events. If you have any hearing and go to a Deaf night at a...
  7. feminishfeminist reblogged this from slecnaztemnot
  8. dancingpieces reblogged this from itsdeadtome
  9. itsdeadtome reblogged this from caesuria and added:
    I used to go to the vancouver folk music festival every year. My mum is HoH, and I am less so but still identify as HoH,...
  10. caesuria reblogged this from withasmoothroundstone
  11. clazzjassicalrockhop reblogged this from andreashettle
  12. madmanwithanotp reblogged this from eponinejosette and added:
    I use captions whenever they’re available, even though my hearing is fine. I’m more used to it, because my mom’s HoH, so...
  13. carafemme reblogged this from eponinejosette and added:
    I love this whole thread. I had never heard of CAPD before now, but I’ve had trouble understanding spoken word...
  14. mustacchiofurioso reblogged this from andreashettle
  15. arctic-hands reblogged this from eponinejosette
  16. otloving reblogged this from fka-losomt
  17. roenok reblogged this from wanderingstrider
  18. fka-losomt reblogged this from andreashettle
  19. wanderingstrider reblogged this from andreashettle
  20. miscellaneous7 reblogged this from andreashettle
  21. blue-fashion reblogged this from andreashettle
  22. taking40cakes reblogged this from andreashettle
  23. thewhaleridingvulcan reblogged this from eponinejosette and added:
    I agree with all of this EXCEPT the part where its assumed the anon wasn’t asking just the way it looks. How do we know...