Silence – a pre-study, 2010
The video/audio piece is based on interviews made during fall 2010 with 5 people living with varied degrees of deafblindness. Music and sounds are a ways to communicate, but what is it like not to be able to fully be part of that? This piece tries to identify the nature of different levels of sight- and hearingloss, to a fully sighted and hearing person. Deafblindness is the condition of little or no useful sight and little or no useful hearing. Deafblind people have an experience quite distinct from people who are only deaf or only blind. A blind person can learn to compensate with hearing, so e. g. the person is still able to move more freely. This work sums up what we talked about during the interviews. About different kinds of memories. Does a musical memory exist? Have you ever heard anything? What kind of sounds are your favourite sounds and have you ever played an instrument? How about the high-pitched sounds such as bells, alarms, whistles etc? It turned out most, if not all, had a very hard time dealing with theese types of sounds. Even though the 1950s was a golden era for hearing aid it had a lot of defects and some thought it easier to live without it.
note: Hearing aids are incapable of truly correcting a hearing loss; they are an aid to make sounds more accessible.
Many thanks to
Förbundet Sveriges Dövblinda
http://www.fsdb.orghttps://youtu.be/gtJ2dytg6WQ