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Kat Germain considers media accessibility strategies while translating signed music by Deaf artists, drawing on her experience as a visual translator/interpreter and audio describer for Blind and partially sighted audience members. Germain queries: What is the disparity between a Deaf artist's (nonvocal) work and a Blind audience member's experience of it? When does visual translation stop being a copy, and when does it become a work of art in its own right if the audience member's only experience is the audible translation, an unavoidably a creative act? Along with Germain, the panel (Deaf scholar/artist, Blind scholar/creator/audience member, and a sound engineer) discusses aspects of ethics and aesthetics of accessibility in the arts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum focuses on a journey in understanding and appreciating signed music as a performing art from deaf musicians. Signed music is an emerging inter-performative art form that includes lyrical and/or non-lyrical musical performances connecting to the culture of deaf people who communicate through signed languages. This forum follow-ups with the three signed music deaf musicians who participation in the Partition/Ensemble 2020 Conference, which was held in Montreal, Quebec, in the summer of 2020, and was organized by the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and the Société québécoise d'études théâtrales. Deaf musicians from around Canada convened in this plenary to discuss how they used their creativity, research, and scholarship to produce signed music works. The follow-up dialogue, in which Youssouf, Witcher, and Cripps participated, discusses their paths with new projects. They responded to three different questions: 1) What have we learned from the plenary? 2) Are there any new signed music pieces? If yes, expand on your piece; and 3) Are there any new works related to signed music (mentorship, research, etc.)? If yes, expand on your new work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]