Proposal For Visual Music For The Deaf

Real music delivering an emotional, spiritual experience for people with hearing disabilities that is as powerful and uplifting as the experience hearing people enjoy when they listen to aural music.

We are on the threshold of major changes in the welfare of people with hearing disabilities. Affordable communication equipment is now available to help produce significant improvements in the employment, English literacy and communication capability of people with hearing disabilities. Manufacturers will produce even better and less expensive communication equipment than the usable equipment we have now. Not only will deaf welfare undergo remarkable change, but Deaf Culture itself will undergo change.

The terrible societal problems which have plagued the deaf community for so long can now be defeated in our time. But the future will be brighter for other reasons. The spiritual and artistic needs of people with hearing disabilities will be fulfilled by truly wondrous things which can happen, as follows:

People with hearing disabilities will be able to sit back and enjoy, but really enjoy, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or any of the musical works of Bartok, Mahler, Verdi, Saint Saëns or any musical work, including country music, spirituals and rock! This can happen. people with hearing disabilities can see music unfolding on a screen!

It is true that some people with severe hearing disabilities can’t hear music. But who says they can’t enjoy music? Here’s what’s up ahead after the problems of employment and literacy are solved by the use of advanced communication equipment.

We have the technology to reproduce music as a new, large, fulfilling artistic visual experience for people with hearing disabilities that will be unlike anything ever done. What we have in mind is a new artform that will emerge from the marriage of engineers, scientists, musicians and artists. These people, as a team, will produce new electronic equipment that will transform the sound of a lone violin or a lone trumpet or a full orchestra in a presto movement into colorful visual imagery in motion on a large home viewing screen.

People with hearing disabilities will be able to watch a Beethoven symphony and enjoy a new artistic, emotional, and spiritual experience. We have the technology and the talent to accomplish this right now. Such equipment could be called the “Music Interpreter.”

But after a “Music Interpreter” becomes available, then what?

What’s next?

A natural result flowing from this development will be “Music Appreciation Courses” for people with hearing disabilities. Such courses will teach people with hearing disabilities to identify the relationship between the trumpet, for example, and the image produced by the instrument as it appears on screen. A music appreciation course will teach people with hearing disabilities to pick out the first violin section while a symphony is in progress, or the male voices when watching Handel’s Messiah unfold on a screen.

There’s no reason in the world why people with hearing disabilities should not have music in their lives. It’s even conceivable that up ahead we’ll see deaf composers writing music for known, established instruments and seeing it played back on a screen and hearing people enjoying music composted by a deaf person on a stereo! This will be no lava lamp on a screen.

We see a future for people with hearing disabilities vastly different from what they’ve known. They may be robbed of the ability to hear, but people with hearing disabilities are sensitive and intelligent and can grow, and there’s no reason in the world why, in our day and age that is so abundant with new available technology addressing so many problems and creativeness, they shouldn’t be given every chance, every opportunity to enjoy new experiences as much as anyone else. We’ve got the tools and the talent to accomplish these things now.

Concerning the above discussion, music-to-visual encoders may well spring up and compete with each other by offering their own versions of a Beethoven Seventh or a Brahms Second Piano Concerto or the Star-Spangled Banner! People with hearing disabilities will then have a choice of music-to-visual recordings for home viewing and they’ll learn to discriminate as to which recording of a particular composition they like best!

Turning or "Scourging" Deaf Advocates Into Double Edged Swords

So it has been a big KUDOS to Dawnsignpress all these years! People buy their books
and products from everywhere.

Even kudos from my own vlog post! I have nothing against what they produced that's being used by the deaf peddlers for their personal income.

Their kudos goes on to a thunderous scale as evidenced below.

Deaf websites carry their stuff;

http://dcaradeafstore.com/bacoinamsila.html

http://www.buyasl.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=570

Web articles praise them;

On hitting a home run...

http://signsofsuccess.gallaudet.edu/text/interviews-dannis.htm

Even deaf blogs cheer them;

http://www.ridorlive.com/?m=20061101

http://deafness.about.com/b/a/051118.htm

http://lenois.com/?p=62

Yes it's a big kudos to Dawnsignpress for printing the small 16 page booklets deaf people have been seen selling, or you can say peddling, for their living.

Take a look at -> http://www.dawnsign.com/shopping/Detail.cfm?ProductID=169

The big question is; Why arent they getting the same flak as I got?

Take a look at the colorful comments at -> http://www.deafadvocacy.org/blog/2007/07/playing-deaf-card-in-free-enterprise.html for having peddling cards available for deaf people to print themselves.

Unlike Dawnsignspress or DCARA, we're not even making deaf people pay for the peddling cards from our deaf center. It's free and downloadable straight from our website.

Maybe they wont get any flak because to you all, Dawnsignpress seems to be a very 'deaf enough' business based on all the great praise and patronage they've been getting all these years.

With Dawnsignpress getting all the bouquets of praise and me getting all the brickbats thrown at over publishing the peddling booklets/cards, that's just one great way to turn, or you can say "to scourge", the deaf advocates like me into double edged swords.

Richard

Feasibility Study On The Use Of Manual Communications By People Born With Hearing Impairments After January 1, 2010

There is a need for a third party feasibility study on the use of manual communications by people with hearing impairments born after January 1, 2010.

There's 2 sides of this fiery debate on whether manual communications are good for babies with hearing impairments at this time yet the evidence they supplied so far have strong ideological tones. It's time for a feasibility study to be conducted to produce the scientific evidence.

A feasibility study will help put to rest the protracted debate of of the reliability of manual communications and provide results based evidence.

The face of the hearing impaired population is changing dramatically and there will be the question of whether manual communications will be appropriate for children born with hearing impairments after 2010.

Scientific evidence will be coming from prelingual and postlingual people with hearing impairments and will reflect the impact of the communication methods on their lives.

6 main groups will be studied;

1) People with prelingual hearing impairments who use manual communications

2) People with prelingual hearing impairments who communicate orally

3) People with prelingual hearing impairments who communicate orally and use manual communications

4) People with postlingual hearing impairments who use manual communications

5) People with postlingual hearing impairments who communicate orally

6) People with postlingual hearing impairments who communicate orally and use manual communications

The study will measure the impact of the different comunciation methods on the lives of people with hearing impairments and will be used to help people decide on the appropriate comunication methods for children with hearing impairments born after January 1, 2010.

Richard

$82,000 Federal Grant Will Enable The Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center To Re-Invent C.A.R.T.

July 21, 2007 : We did it! We developed a linux based CART system in 9 days!

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Last week I picked up a grant that will enable the Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center to re-invent Communication Access Real-time Translation (CART) to make it more accessible to public schools.

Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is the instant translation of the spoken word into English text using a stenotype machine, notebook computer and realtime software. The text appears on a computer monitor or other display. This technology is primarily used by people who are late-deafened, oral deaf, hard-of-hearing, or have cochlear implants.

The Americans with Disabilities Act specifically recognized CART as an assistive technology which affords "effective communication access."

The realistic need of CART these days is that more students are requesting it because the bulk of the newer deaf generation are being schooled without the use of manual communications. These types of deaf students will not be needing sign language interpreters. This has increased the demand of CART services and that increased the costs of these services as well.

Many schools do not have access to CART because of the high cost and the results are news like Samantha Solorzano, a deaf sophomore at Glendora High School, in the Los Angeles Area, won a lawsuit against her school requiring it to provide her with a real-time transcription of her classes.

However Glendora High School appealed the ruling complaining the $35,000 a year CART service would be an extreme solution.

"Extreme" because nobody has ever attempted to re-invent CART to make it cheaper and more accessible to public schools. We got the grant and Orange County Deaf Advocacy Center will get the chance to re-invent CART and our goal is to have very low cost CART programs implimented in at least 5 mainstreaming schools by the end of 2008. We will be creating a model of a new CART program that can easily be replicated in schools throughout the United States.

Richard Roehm

"We Can Adapt Ourselves" - Our 2007 Deaf Awareness Education Booth Theme

This year at the Orange County Fair, our deaf awareness education booth theme is "We Can Adapt Ourselves" where we show we can use adaptive technology, and use technology on ourselves to make our lives better.

Here I start by showing the adaptive technology table, then I move on to the posters of us helping a deaf-blind guy get his eyes back, then I went on to explain a successful experiment in which a deaf-blind person can "see" with his cochlear implant.

In this experiment, we hooked up an $700 echolocation device to his cochlear implant and his cane and he was able to hear the difference between a concrete floor, a grassy floor, walls, desk, chairs, and me standing in his way. We were able to teach him how to navigate his way around the office building almost like how a bat navigates through the air using echolocation.

Then I went on to show more posters including the poster of the new brainstem implant technology and I credited my mom with the artwork. And closed it off by showing the 'sex wax' surfing wax collection at the next booth.

We do this for 3 weeks, the entire length of the fair, we will tell hundreds of thousands of people we deaf people can adapt ourselves to be able to enjoy all aspects of life offerings.

Richard

PS : Video looks better because we got a new cam for it.