The sign language interpreter changing the way we listen to music

The ​‘dra­ma stu­dio’ – a class­room whose breeze blocks had been paint­ed navy rather than cream – at my school didn’t have desks. Class­es were nor­mal­ly spent sit­ting on chairs in a cir­cle. When it came to watch­ing things, we’d crowd our seats around the TV, much like peo­ple did in the ​’50s when the first per­son on the street got a set. On this aus­pi­cious Thurs­day morn­ing, our dra­ma teacher, Mr. Drake, wheeled out the TV trol­ley and told us to watch. In the dark­ness, the open­ing cred­its to The Shin­ing lit up our faces. The sweep­ing shots of moun­tains and val­leys, of wind­ing roads and rivers were cap­ti­vat­ing. We sat there in total silence, with the sound of the tele­vi­sion right down, in awe of the beau­ty of Kubrick’s shots. The stun­ning vast­ness of it all was unlike any­thing most of us had ever expe­ri­enced. As the Over­look Hotel shud­dered into view, Mr. Drake stopped the video, rewound it and turned up the vol­ume. ​“Now watch again,” he told us, ​“and see what’s different.” 

This time, the open­ing shot of the lake and the small island in the cen­tre of it flick­ered onto screen accom­pa­nied by an eerie, over­bear­ing organ melody. As the cred­its rolled, I felt a sharp intake of breath. This couldn’t be the same piece of footage we’d just watched. Where there was beau­ty, there was now men­ace. Where there was awe, now sat fear. An uneasi­ness rest­ed upon us as we took it in, star­ing blankly at the screen long after the clip had fin­ished and been replaced by dig­i­tal snow. A sim­ple, but mas­ter­ful sound­track changed every­thing. In so many ways, music can make or break art. It ele­vates it. It changes the mean­ing of a moment or a phrase. Soft­ens or hard­ens it. Wraps it in joy or lays it bare in the bleak­est pos­si­ble terms. What hap­pens then, when you can­not hear the music? When the peaks and falls that shape the images or the words are inac­ces­si­ble to you? It’s this ques­tion that sign lan­guage pio­neer Amber Gal­loway has set out to answer.

The line is crack­ly as we con­nect over Zoom. Fes­ti­val sea­son is in full swing on both sides of the Atlantic and Amber’s high­light was Lol­la­palooza in Chica­go, Illi­nois, which saw head­line acts like Lana Del Rey, Bil­lie Eil­ish, and Kendrick Lamar. It was with Lamar, a decade ago, that Amber went viral for her vivid onstage inter­pre­ta­tions of his live show for deaf and hard-of-hear­ing view­ers. Amber is an ASL inter­preter. Amber, arguably, where music is con­cerned, is the ASL interpreter. 

“Nor­mal­ly, some­one with a deaf fam­i­ly mem­ber will see an inter­preter and get inspired,” she says. That wasn’t Amber G’s sto­ry. ​“Iron­i­cal­ly” she adds, she’d had deaf peo­ple in her life for most of it but inspi­ra­tion struck lat­er. After hav­ing her twins ear­ly she went back to college. 

“I bumped into some of my deaf friends from school [while at col­lege]” Amber says. ​“We got chat­ting and they invit­ed me to their table in the cafe­te­ria where every­one would hang out. So I just start­ed hang­ing out, and they start­ed teach­ing me every­thing.” She’d go on to date one of these friends, even­tu­al­ly get­ting mar­ried to him. He adopt­ed her twins, they had a third son togeth­er and sign­ing became part of the tapes­try of their fam­i­ly life. ​“Even­tu­al­ly,” she says, her South­ern drawl and pep com­bin­ing to make her a nat­ur­al sto­ry­teller, ​“I start­ed hav­ing par­ties at my house on Fri­days where we would sign songs and have fun. My deaf friends would tell me – ​‘inter­preters don’t look like you!’ I’d be like, ​“why?”. ​“And they’d tell me, ​‘they just don’t do music like you, they don’t look like you, you should real­ly do some­thing about it’, and so I did.” From there, Amber, who was born with all of her hear­ing, enrolled in an inter­preter train­ing pro­gramme. But her days in class and her nights spent with her friends, chat­ting and sign­ing music, nev­er real­ly mar­ried up. ​“The teach­ers there would tell me deaf peo­ple don’t like music, but then on Fri­day nights, at my house, we would be danc­ing, sign­ing music back and forth. It was a com­plete con­tra­dic­tion to what I was liv­ing and breath­ing in the community.”

“So many hear­ing peo­ple don’t under­stand what deaf­ness means as well as deaf­ness as a cul­ture. And so from an out­ward eye, they just see deaf­ness and they think about the non-func­tion­ing part of the ear. But music is so much more than what our ears can do.” It’s from this point that Amber start­ed her jour­ney. ​“I was able to see a deaf dance troupe called the Wild Zap­pers. They are incred­i­ble and showed me what music should look like, on the hands of deaf peo­ple. And I was like, this is what inter­preters should look like, this is what music looks like, let’s make that hap­pen.” Amber began trav­el­ling all over her home state of Texas inter­pret­ing. She built up a fol­low­ing for her unique, vis­cer­al style of inter­pret­ing music until, in 2002, her life changed. ​“I was work­ing as an inter­preter and I con­tract­ed spinal menin­gi­tis. It actu­al­ly caused me to lose a sig­nif­i­cant amount of my hear­ing as well as my sight and now I have neu­ro­log­i­cal prob­lems from it. Before I was just a vis­i­tor to the com­mu­ni­ty, then I became a part of it and the cul­ture.” Amber returned to inter­pret­ing with renewed vigour, trav­el­ling across the coun­try, the phys­i­cal­i­ty and breadth of her per­for­mance con­tin­u­ing to set her apart. 

Where there was an instru­men­tal sec­tion in a song, ​“most inter­preters would just make one move­ment to show music”, she explains. ​“It would actu­al­ly make me mad because dur­ing that time I was mar­ried to a pro­found­ly deaf per­son who would see gui­tars but have no idea what they sound­ed like because the inter­preter would just sign the sign for music. They would nev­er show what that looked like or what that felt like or any of the tones.”

Tak­ing inspi­ra­tion from deaf sto­ry­tellers, Amber start­ed to rep­re­sent each instru­ment through her sign­ing. ​“When you’re deal­ing with sign lan­guage, you set up the scene, so if Susan and Bob are talk­ing, Susan will be on the right side, Bob will be on the left side. When I’m inter­pret­ing, I’ll put my piano on my right side, the snare drum high­er up on the left side. I put my bass or my kick drum in front of my stom­ach area and I’ll refer back and forth to where I’ve set these instru­ments up. So that they all exist and their voic­es live.” How does one even begin to pre­pare for some­thing like that at a fes­ti­val where you might be inter­pret­ing dozens, maybe hun­dreds of songs? She laughs. ​“So what you’re not see­ing is usu­al­ly sev­er­al weeks of work before we even get to the fes­ti­val,” she explains. Amber, whose pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Amber G Pro­duc­tions offers inter­pret­ing ser­vices for con­certs and events across the Unit­ed States, employs whole teams of peo­ple. They mem­o­rise the lyrics while also deep div­ing into the artists, under­stand­ing their goal and their mes­sage. ​“There are some pro­duc­tion com­pa­nies that total­ly get what we get and under­stand what we do. So they will send out a let­ter to the artists that we’ve cre­at­ed togeth­er so that the artists under­stand the impor­tance of us try­ing to get the setlist before. It’s beau­ti­ful when that hap­pens, because we are their voic­es dur­ing that time for their con­cert goers. When we work in uni­son, it’s kind of like a dance.”

It can some­times be only min­utes before a gig that Amber and her team (who help her from in the pit), get the setlist, so she has a vast bank of lyrics and move­ments stored in her head. ​“My babysit­ter was the tele­vi­sion, so I’m real­ly good at mak­ing movies in my head. I draw pic­tures on my lyrics and lis­ten to the song so many times that it becomes part of a sto­ry.” She admits she has ​“thou­sands and thou­sands of pages of print­ed lyrics” with doo­dles and pic­tures on. 

Her nov­el approach to inter­pret­ing – a holis­tic, full-body expe­ri­ence, saw Amber cat­a­pult­ed to fame. A video of her inter­pret­ing A$AP Rocky’s ​‘Fuckin’ Prob­lems’ being per­formed by Kendrick Lamar at Lol­la­palooza in 2013 went viral when it was uploaded to YouTube. Amber went on to make an appear­ance on Jim­my Kim­mel Live! with Wiz Khal­i­fa. The expe­ri­ence of viral­i­ty has been repeat­ed a num­ber of times, most recent­ly in 2019 when Amber was seen tak­ing on rap­per Twista’s machine-gun fire flow in a video post­ed by the musi­cian him­self. Her exten­sive career has seen Amber share the stage with some of the biggest names in music. Her favourites? ​“Snoop Dogg, TLC and Salt-N-Pepa – those were a part of my jour­ney in my life, being able to actu­al­ly sign for them was a huge hon­our. I nev­er thought I would live to be where I’m at. I had a real­ly hard child­hood and hard life so to be able to be with some of my most influ­en­tial music of my child­hood brings home this sense of warmth and love and who I am.” 

On going viral, Amber is reflec­tive. ​“You know, it’s been an inter­est­ing jour­ney. It has allowed me to have a big­ger voice, and to be able to edu­cate a lot of peo­ple on the impor­tance of access in the enter­tain­ment world. And I’ve seen a lot of changes from that. So I feel like that has been real­ly impact­ful.” With the pos­i­tives come the neg­a­tives. ​“I’ve got­ten a lot of back­lash, because I am a white per­son and I have been on stages doing rap music which is a part of Black cul­ture.” She points to the lim­it­ed nature of viral clips that mean peo­ple don’t under­stand her back­ground, ​“who I was raised with, what that cul­ture means to me and the respect I have for it.” 

Amber has worked hard to cre­ate teams that are more diverse, striv­ing to pro­tect ​“our BIPOC, our black and brown inter­preters who are often expe­ri­enc­ing racism in our field. I’ve tried as much as I can, to not take up those spaces. To cre­ate spaces, and to invite as many BIPOC inter­preters who want to be on stage and want to be sup­port­ed onto the team. I want to make sure that we are rep­re­sent­ing the music authen­ti­cal­ly.” While watch­ing Amber and her team, it’s clear to see their desire for inclu­sion – to open up the words of the world to all. To colour in the spaces between them with their signs, and, in the process, add more colour and depth to the world itself. 

“The biggest com­ment that we get when we get viral videos is ​‘why in the world do deaf peo­ple go to con­certs’. But you know what? That’s not your lens to live through. How about open up that lens more and look through the eyes of a deaf per­son? Think big­ger than your lens. We uplift human­i­ty by includ­ing oth­ers, and not exclud­ing because the music itself isn’t discriminating.”

This piece appeared in Huck #80. Get your copy here.

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