Silent World: Feeling the Music Through the Skin
London-based writer, producer and SignSong rapper Signkid shares his feelings on making music that engages multiple senses and his experience as a deaf musician.
Photo by Gabrielle Salonga via Instagram: @signkidgram
After my latest conversation with digital artist Ben Heim (see issue no.5) about artistic experiences engaging multiple senses, I’ve been fascinated by the continuous research for disruptive and cutting-edge ways of creating, understanding and feeling different types of art forms, particularly music. For the following interview, I was inspired by the common misconception of music being directly and exclusively linked to the human sense of hearing, and after learning slightly more about innovative and alternative music methods, I decided to reach out to Signkid, London-based writer, producer and signsong rapper whose deafness hasn’t become anything but an inspiring tool to explore, enjoy and perform music to share his story.
Together with Cat, a sign language interpreter who works hand-in-hand with Signkid, we talked about making what seems “impossible” possible, about listening to music through your skin and his latest short film “Silent World” which captures his experience facing the Covid-19 outbreak as a deaf man.
Georgina: Do you remember how your first approach to music came about?
Signkid: I remember a time when I was around eleven years old and I was with my brother watching a Michael Jackson music video and the dancing was just amazing! He was moonwalking and I was really wild about it. I remember getting the goose pimples and obviously, I tried to copy and imitate the dancing. At that time though, there were no subtitles nor anything on the TV so I couldn’t access the lyrics and I couldn’t actually know what were they talking about in the songs. So I tried to ask people about the song names but I couldn’t always get the right answer so I couldn’t access it properly. I started looking for different hip hop, rap, pop, and rock music videos, and when the internet became more widespread and popular, you know when things really changed online, then I could start to research more about music. This is when I started finding a lot of different new things and I could finally follow the lyrics. That was such a breakthrough for me because the fact that I could read the lyrics with the song made it accessible for me and that was something I didn’t expect to eventually happen. Also, I remember seeing deaf people making music as well, and then, when I was about nineteen, I went to a library and I remember seeing a book on Tupac Shakur. It was called, The Rose That Grew from Concrete. I started reading it and that just inspired me! Just straight away I started writing lyrics about my own life. That’s when music became more serious for me.
G: So we could say that your relationship with music drastically changed for good with the boom of the internet, right? Which other musicians besides Tupac have influenced your musical career?
S: Biggie Smalls, Nas, Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar are definitely the main ones. But now I’m a little bit more open-minded with my taste in music. Before I would only listen to hip-hop, r&b and rap all the time but now I’ve become a little bit more open-minded with different genres like pop, rock jazz, reggae, reggaeton, Latin American rhythms, etc.
G: In an interview with Musical Vibrations, a project by The Acoustics Research Unit from the University of Liverpool, I read that you are able to feel and create music through vibrotactile resources. Can you tell us more about these tools?
S: I was invited by the University of Liverpool to try them. As part of this experience, I had to sit down and take both my shoes and socks off. The equipment consisted of speakers placed underneath my feet so that I could feel the vibrations coming through while playing some music. I was connected to a laptop so I could feel each beat under my feet. I could tell the difference between the different sounds. It was quite a good experience and it was something different but, ultimately, it didn’t suit me. I am more like a performer in that I like to be standing up and moving around all the time. But I appreciate trying it out as something different.
G: And now that you mention it, how does your performative process occur?
S: When I perform on a stage at festivals, I always make sure that I can communicate with the technical man about being in sync. I make sure that I feel comfortable picking up the sound and feeling the vibrations in the right volume or in the right amount of pace. However, on stage it can be a lot more difficult and if the material is not made out of wood —which allows me to more accurately feel the vibrations that make me able to move— or the speakers are very small, then it’s really difficult for me to hear.
G: I understand that your performative work consists of sign-singing a song which undoubtedly has a lot to do with following a rhythm. Is your experience with dancing related to this?
S: If I go to a club where music is always loud, I can always feel it within my whole body and I can dance. Then people ask me something but I can’t obviously hear them so I tell them, “Sorry, I’m deaf” and they don’t believe it because I can follow the rhythm and dance along with the song. So when I ask them why they don’t believe me, some of them say, “Oh! Well… some hearing people can’t follow the rhythm even though they can hear it!” And I thought that that was impossible! I never even thought about the concept of being a hearing person who couldn’t follow the rhythm of the music. I found it very interesting.
Instagram: @signkidgram
G: I find this super interesting because it’s as if you could literally feel the music through your skin, almost as a kinesthetic experience.
S: That’s right!
G: I know that you write your own lyrics as well. What subjects do you usually address in your songs?
S: Any subjects! What I’ve been through my life, my story, what I see, what I’ve experienced, what I’ve witnessed with other people and their stories. I am always trying to find new and different inspirations from books, people, and anything that happens that can influence me to write new lyrics. So I am really open-minded to talk about any subject, and I am trying not to focus on the same thing because I feel that people could get bored of that. That’s why Tupac influenced me so much because his subjects were really diverse; he spoke about women, he spoke about poverty, family, politics, romance… He covered a lot of different areas and I think that influenced me.
G: What’s the role of the sign language interpreters you work with during your creative process? How does this collaboration develop?
S: The musical process is different from a hearing perspective. For hearing people, the process is usually more straightforward: they write the lyrics, they sing or interpret the song, and record. In the deaf world, it’s a little bit different. I would write my lyrics and then translate that into the song. A sign version needs to be recorded too so I would ask a hearing person to collaborate and ask if they would want to rap to my lyrics. I bring that person in and the song would be recorded. Finally, I would do a translated version of that to cover the deaf audience.
G: What inspired you to create your debut EP, Music Is the Message?
S: As I said before, a lot of things were happening in the environment at the time. A lot of clubs and festivals that I’ve been to had influenced me on that EP and on the type of writing I did. A lot of people just didn’t believe that deaf people could make music so I experienced a lot by going to these different events. They inspired me to start writing and I really wanted to get the message out there that deaf people can do this– and if they can do music, they can do practically anything. So that was the main message and the main inspiration behind the EP.
G: Your latest short film, Silent World, which was nominated for the big screen in North America, Oscar and BAFTA, explores the feeling of isolation experienced by deaf people during the Covid-19 outbreak. How was the idea of producing this film born?
S: When Covid started in 2020, and specifically in March of that year with the lockdown, it hit me a lot because I didn’t know what was happening. I didn’t know what was going on in the world and there was no access to that information so I didn’t know what to do. The prime minister didn’t have an interpreter next to him to give the breaking news every day and hearing people had the news– but deaf people instantly felt behind. And it just stayed like that consistently because the information that you would see on the TV and on the news was changing all the time but even the captions were not always accurate and they left behind the speaker so they didn’t always mean what the person was saying. For hearing people that was fine but a lot of deaf people felt behind with the news and with what was happening during that time. After the speeches were finished you could get some brief information posted online and sometimes on Twitter which was useful but I think it would have been nice if the prime minister would have had an interpreter next to him so that deaf people could have known what was going on. And then the proper lockdown happened. The streets were just empty. It reminded me of a film and that’s what inspired me to start writing. I wrote a proposal and presented it to the director, Charlie Dennis. He liked it and he showed it to the production team who liked it too and that’s when we started to produce a short film. The project eventually went out and I’ve had a lot of positive feedback so I’m just hoping that it wins more awards and more recognition to spread awareness. Watch the full film here.