Deaf Music

Music as experienced, created, and culturally interpreted by d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing individuals and communities. Deaf music encompasses a multimodal, spatio-temporal engagement with rhythm, vibration, visual performance, song signing, and emotional resonance — often foregrounding bodily and visual dimensions that hearing audiences may treat as secondary. The concept pushes back against framings of music as inherently auditory and against 'accessibility retrofits' that simply add captions to hearing-centered formats, arguing instead for design rooted in Deaf cultural practices such as ASL song signing, visual performance, and vibrotactile experience.