In the United States alone, there are nearly three million school-age children considered to be deaf or hearing impaired. With limited funding and shrunken art curriculum, these students have been unfairly restricted from exploring something we all take for granted: music.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way, and Los Angeles-based songwriter/producer Brendan Angelides, AKA Eskmo, is doing something about it.
Through the San Diego-based non-profit FeelHarmonic, Eskmo has created a project to develop experiences aimed at enriching music education programs in hard of hearing communities. In partnership with SubPac, they’ve developed a project which centers around a tactile experience where students and attendees can both feel and see sound.
After such a successful reaction to the program, Eskmo has high hopes for its future, and rightly so. “If we can have different people using emerging technologies that are coming out right now to engage people on a very fun, physical level, I have no idea where that can go.” And it’s not as though Eskmo is the only one teaching in this situation. There’s an entire realm of musical understanding that most of us are oblivious to, which opens up a range of new thoughts and ideas.
“I’m learning bit by bit [the hard of hearing community] has their own amazing culture and I hadn’t thought about how deep it goes. For example, with music there’s a common perception where if something sounds really fast it’s generally thought of as being happy, and that’s not something that someone can hear or equate with that whatsoever. If [the students] felt the feeling of a kick drum playing faster and faster, [to them] that meant the song must be getting happier and happier. This is a whole different way of thinking that opens new avenues for conveying ideas.”
Click here to learn more about FeelHarmonic.
H/T Feel Harmonic