Ted summary and Reflection

THE ENCHANTING MUSIC OF SIGN LANGUAGE

By: Christine Sun Kim

Summarized by: Najmiatul Fauza

this time I would like to make a reflection from Cristine Sun Kim about American Sign Language (ASL)

Piano is her favorite musical symbol. It means to play softly. She draws a “p” which consist of so many “p” but still never reach silence, that is her current definition of silence, a very obscured sound. ASL( American Sign Language) is actually brought from French Sign Language during early 1800s and as time went by mixed with local sign and evolved into the language that know today as ASL.

She was born deaf and was taught to believe that sound wasn’t  a part of her life. She said that a deaf people living in the world of sound it’s as if she was living in a foreign country blindly following its rules, customs, behaviors, and  norms without ever questioning them.

In deaf culture, movement is equivalent to sound. In 2008, she had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany for an artist residency. There, she had been working as a painter. She visited museums and Galleries and found there no visual art everything was auditory. But she realized that doesn’t to be the case at all, sound doesn’t have to be something just experienced through the ears. Sound like money, power control, social currency. It like power that can either disempower her and her artwork or it could empower her. She chose to be empowered.

There is a similarity between ASL and music, for example: a musical note can not be fully captured and expressed on paper. ASL is broken down in to many different parameters, if you assign a different parameter to teach finger as you play the piano such as facial expression, body movement speed, hand shape. ASL is like a chord, all 10 fingers need to come down simultaneously to express a clear concept in ASL.

 In addition, how a distance from the body can express the changes in time. For instance: 1 H is one hand, 2 H is two hands, present tense happen closest and in front of the body, future is in front of the body and past is behind the body. She also suggest to have an experience in learning ASL because it’s like a rich treasure.

Finally, this speech is very motivated normal  people to learn Sign language , and also  motivate the deaf people not to be disempowered just because they can not hear the sound and cannot speak. Learning sign language is very interesting because we communicate using some signs, shape, orientation, location facial expression.